The wolf and the fox
by katnassy
Summary: Sequel to More than a little human friend. Further adventures of Dyson and Kenzi with occasional appearance of other characters and a slight Bo - Tamsin storyline later on. Rating chosen for further chapters and more just in case than by careful design.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer: I do not own Lost Girl or any of its characters, just borrowing for non-monetary creative attempts. **

Chapter 1

"That was piece of cake!" Kenzi claimed waving the newly stolen wallet in the air without much sense of triumph, "so much so that it starts to lose its shine to me." Dyson chuckled good-humouredly draping his hand over her thin shoulders. "Well, for the sake of the sport try not to use your superspeed next time around," he advised half-jokingly.

"But you said I must train," Kenzi dragged out all the vowels to their maximum capacity.

"You can practice on animals, not people, they are by definition faster and more of a challenge in this respect. When you can grab a nut off a squirrel consider the speed course finished," the wolf told her in a pretend-teacher voice.

"Well, I think I can already grab a nut of a certain wolf," the girl shot back naughtily.

"Your thoughts are constantly veering off track," Dyson said trying and failing to instill a reproachful note in his intended rebuke, "but I like the direction they stray into."

"Someone here also needs training," Kenzi giggled slipping her arm around his waist and pressing her body into his side, "for such an experienced warrior you still deplorably lack finesse and pillow talk skills – the last thing a girl wants to hear after an amazing sex session is _and now fifty press-ups_."

The wolf parroted her intonation, "And now go back and return the wallet."

"Hello, there's money in it," the girl whispered in consternation, "It's against my professional code." But prodded by a stern look from Dyson she made her way back to the open-air café and passed by the table of her victim restoring the man's finances to their original state with a speed defying the human eye. Then Kenzi returned to the wolf checking herself in a tiny mirror with a light pout.

"And the question that keeps bugging me: is it a sun patch or is my hair going red?" she inquired with a concerned look. "It's not really my colour of preference. Always thought it's a dead giveaway for a con-artist. Do you go for red-heads?"

"Your kitsune features are revealing themselves and developing gradually, babe," Dyson reminded her patiently, "Actually, the list of possibilities is more than wide."

"What have we got for now? Speed, better vision – remember you said I needed glasses, nice to put you wrong – and reddish streaks," Kenzi was counting on her fingers and snagged her gaze on her nails, "And let's not forget, manicure is gonna be hell. These claws?! How do you varnish them? Oh, yes, you don't! This kitsune stuff is ruining my unique look."

Dyson didn't deign her ramblings with a reply and looked at the watch instead. "Let's get on with the shopping. We need to be back at the cabin in an hour tops. I wanted you to do a series of dagger-throws with the sun low in your line of vision."

"Charming," Kenzi mumbled dragging her feet behind the striding wolf, "when you said a trip with a spot of romantic love-making how big a spot were you talking about?"

Truth be told, Dyson himself was experiencing significant difficulty keeping to the strict outline of their training plan. Every day for a month already he had been bringing Kenzi out into the woods to put her through a running, hunting, snatching routine to be followed by a stint of sword-fighting and dagger-throwing. Then they would relocate to the lake for a swimming course and in the evenings Dyson dragged the less than cooperative girl out into the woods again to check her senses in their night mode. Her eyes were the most manifestly boosted, almost to Dyson-level. "Another hundred years and it'll be as sharp as mine," the wolf consoled, though her hearing and sense of smell was lagging pitifully behind. And at every slightest opportunity the foxy ex-human managed to get him distracted and involved in an activity baring only a remote resemblance to sport, though perfectly physical. Not that he could bring himself to complain.

Despite all the obstacles arising in their way they still got quite a lot of work done. At least, for now Kenzi seemed fairly at home with her newly acquired claws and fangs, though moaning about the animalistic look and the complexity of fine-tuning it in accordance to her fashion sense.

Another totally out-of-the-blue power Kenzi was getting a handle of was an exceptional memory she still hadn't figured out how to use. Not strictly applicable in a fight, the ability to retain huge chunks of information was revealing itself in instant absorption of the menus at the cafes, price tags at the shop and glossy magazines they were availing themselves of in the little town five kilometers away from their cabin on the lake shore aka training base.

"I might go to college, study a bunch of high-flown sounding subjects and enjoy myself showing Lauren up every now and then," Kenzi reflected dreamily once during a short break between the running and the dagger-throwing she had managed to carve for herself from her strict wolf.

"Knowing something is not tantamount to understanding it," Dyson softly taunted, "and here Lauren would hand your smart ass to you more often than not."

"Hey, whose side are you on, fluffy?" the girl exclaimed in mock-indignation, "Ok, scrap the college. I am too awesome for higher education."

That particular sunny day Dyson loaded the boot with the food and the stuff to last them till the end of the week and rounded the window-shopping girl into the car. Kenzi plopped down into the passenger seat and stuck her nose into a fashion magazine she had snatched at the newsagents. "What?!" she raised an eyebrow at Dyson's quizzical look, "You made me return the wallet and I had no money to pay for it. Had to lift it."

"You do see a moral dilemma here, Kenzi," the wolf remarked unable to hide his amusement, "To pay for a magazine with the stolen money wouldn't have helped the matters either."

"I'm stuck in the sticks with you doing some crazy Rambo stuff. I am entitled at least to fashion visuals," the girl grumbled flipping through the glossy not overburdened by qualms. "Hey, I could totally rock this jacket. And the top, on second thought, nay, for this top one needs booby boobs, not Kenzi boobs." Dyson refrained from getting roped into the boobs differentiation discussion and focused on the road ahead of him.

"Speaking of the boobs, have you heard from the mainland?" the girl asked without peeling her eyes off the pictures. "Last time I talked to Bo she sounded distracted but refused to be drawn. Said we'd go for a heart-to-heart once master Yoda sets me free. But I figured all is not well in the Hotpants kingdom."

"Trick is keeping me generally updated, but we steer clear of Bo's choppy love life," Dyson replied cautiously. "But he did mention that Tamsin was around a lot."

"You know I kinda like the blonde with an attitude, though she dares rival my snark on occasion," the girl remarked casually, "I could even say I miss her a bit but not as much as I miss the Succubooby and the rest of the gang."

"Don't try to push my buttons, babe. I miss them too but you need your training and you need focus and you'll never get one with the guys around," the wolf grumbled, "Can't say that you're doing such a great job of focusing as it is … "

"Well, if you could be a tiny bit less sexy, I might be more focused," Kenzi crooned putting her left hand to a good use by snaking it along the shifter's thigh. "As things stand I can test your focus starting now."

"You've just added an extra lap to your afternoon swimming routine," Dyson growled with unconvincing menace fighting a losing battle of trying to ignore the nimble fingers stroking the denim of his jeans.

As much as Dyson actually enjoyed the ride home his resolve not to cut the girl any slack did not falter and the rest of the afternoon they spent practicing the daggers. "Satisfied?" Kenzi inquired wearily after managing to hit the mark consecutively three times. "Yes, for today," her demanding coach replied, "You still lack consistency of result, but practice makes perfect."

"Aren't I perfect?" the girl fluttered her eyelashes mid-way between flirtatious and mock-naïve. "With big pointy things."

"Even talking dirty and looking delicious will not get you out of the swim, Kenzi," Dyson smirked and grabbing hold of the girl's slender waist hoisted her up over his shoulder. "And you superspeed won't come in handy much until you learn to be alert and work on your reflexes," he kept lecturing while carrying the laughing girl through the bushes and onto the lake shore.

"No, Dy, stop, you'll ruin my best work-out outfit," Kenzi protested through snorts and giggles but the shifter paid them no heed and strode straight into the water, then he stopped abruptly and switching the girl into the bridal hold threw her with a splash right into the lukewarm depth. The girl disappeared under the gleaming surface while the wolf was laughing heartily relaxed by the ripple of water and the rays of retiring sun. Seconds were flying by but Kenzi was not in any hurry to resurface, the water was only disturbed by a few air bubbles in the place where she had gone under. Dyson's laugh choked to a half-smirk before fading from his face altogether.

His laid-back amusement was rapidly giving in to a slight worry. Another dozen of inexorable seconds ticked by and still there were no traces of the girl. The wolf mentally counted down to a full minute and couldn't restrain himself any longer.

With a mighty push he propelled himself into the lake head-first diving and breaking surface over and over again desperately searching for Kenzi's snazzy maroon sweatpants or white top. No splash of colour disturbed the uniform dark blue and grey of the lake's interior. Driven practically to distraction Dyson went in for another deep dive testing the capacity of his lungs to the fullest, but he still couldn't find Kenzi. Once again above water the wolf dragged a ragged breath into his oxygen-starved system when his ears picked the all-too-familiar silver laughter. He turned his head following the direction of the sound and saw Kenzi sitting on the rock jutting out from under the water a couple of meters from the shore's edge. She was thoroughly enjoying herself observing the wolf's rescue attempt and was making no attempt of hiding her mirth.

"And who's putting in some extra swimming practice now, D-man?" the girl asked giggling.

Dyson felt immense relief flooding his mind as if he had just been dreaming of the end of the world and woke up to find it had only been a nightmare and the sun was still shining. But once his heart regained its normal beat and his thoughts lined up he was gripped by a much less benign emotion. In a couple of strokes he was beside Kenzi and straightened out of water in front of her dripping water and fury. "What the hell do you think you are doing?" he growled and the girl suddenly lost her glee. She had long learnt to distinguish between Dyson's mock growl and Dyson's really-pissed growl. "I though you might have drowned, I was ready to scour the lake bottom for you and die trying if I fail. You silly girl. You have been given extra powers but you are still behaving like an irresponsible human."

Kenzi's mouth dropped open, under different circumstances she might have gone ballistic at the mere mention of the words silly and human in one tirade but the soul-deep hurt in the wolf's voice pierced her heart. She wrung her still wet hands till the knuckles cracked loudly and she gasped from the self-inflicted pain. "Dyson, I don't know what possessed me," she whispered in wide-eyed consternation, "I wasn't thinking about anything but the fun it would be to watch you looking for me. It was meant to be a practical joke. But it's wasn't like me, Dy. What's happening to me?"

Dyson's anger was dispelled at the first tormented notes to leave his girl's lips. He took a step backwards and put his arms on her shaking shoulders. "It's OK, Kenzi, sorry I shouted, it's just a jest gone wrong," he tried to console her.

"No, it's not, I've been sarcastic, snarky, but never inconsiderate, never that selfish. It's not me, I'm a kitsune, I am turning into a heartless trickster, it was in the book, the fox pulling stunts that could drive people crazy," Kenzi was rambling scared and distraught, "I'm becoming a monster who can't control his nature, like Bo used to be. Am I also going to hurt people, to kill them."

"Stop it, babe," Dyson finally took full hold of the girl's trembling slight body and lifted her carefully of the rock to press her like treasure she was to him to his heart. "You are not turning into a monster, you are not going to kill anyone. Bo had a hard time coming to terms with her faeness but the was lost and alone. And you are not, my love, you have me. Forever."

_Author's Note A huge thank- you to all those who read and reviewed the first story and who pushed me to start a sequel as I really need to be pushed sometimes. Hope you'll enjoy it, though truth be told I have no idea yet where it is going. _


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

"I just can't feel it, your damn-precious night life of the forest! Give me the city nightlife any time and I'll hone hell-raising to a fine art but not this!" Kenzi was screaming standing arms akimbo in the middle of the little clearing, "I am not part of nature, I am a city-dweller through and through!"

"Not any longer, babe," Dyson countered calmly accustomed by now to the flares of temper enhanced by the girl's fae-transformation. "Your fighting skills are getting on, but you still need to get a feel for your animal side." He put his large hand on Kenzi's face covering her eyes and said softly, "Concentrate, listen, hear the rustle of leaves in the wind, the trotting of a fat hare in the underbrush, the chirping of birds in the branches. Forest is your home now." The girl's breathing evened out but she was still feeling tetchy and insecure.

"I just can't, Dy," she sighed resignedly. "My night vision is murky, my hearing is indiscriminating, I don't know what I hear. I don't feel at home, I don't feel wild. I am not a shifter like you."

"Even if you can't take your animal form, it's still there in your blood and your bones. Unless you learn to embrace it, you'll never be balanced," the wolf elaborated, "I know I'm playing the slave-driver here, but I am only doing it because I know how dangerous it is for a new fae not to have the grasp of their nature."

"I got it, my good Samaritan, but enough for today," the girl pleaded, "My nails are chipped, my shoes are dirty and there are a couple of wet leaves sticking to my sleeve and my pants and a twig in my hair. I only wonder why a single birdie hasn't yet dropped on me. Don't expect me to feel comfortable with that!"

Dyson's eyes flashed amber in the dark of the forest and a wolfish grin stretched his mouth to reveal a bit of fang. "Comfortable? Looks like someone needs to learn that comfort is boring," he said huskily and suddenly the girl was thrown against the bark of a huge oak. Wind blew out her red-streaked hair and a hot breath scorched the side of her neck – the wolf was pressing her against the tree with his body so that her feet were missing the ground by a few inches. She immediately took advantage of that by looping them around Dyson's waist and driving him a fraction closer and completely mad with lust. The dirtied clothes she had been vigorously complaining about were ripped off her in a flash of claws and she was struck by the realization that the feel of the rough oak against her now bare back and butt felt far less than unpleasant.

Dyson didn't lose any more time before entering her and her scream of pleasure jogged a napping owl into taking to the wing with a screech and the girl was simultaneously aware and unafraid of the feathery presence above their heads. With the quickening pace and deepening thrusts came the feeling of floating in the soft darkness of the forest, of a strange co-operation with the elements around – the wind cooling their heated bodies, the bark enhancing sensitivity of the girl's skin, the rustling-cracking sounds all around playing background music to their love-making.

In a surprise move Dyson took them down onto the leaf-strewn forest floor and Kenzi dug her nails in a to-hell-with-manicure gesture into the soft ground to secure her position under the wolf's thrusts. When she finally looked up into the sky to scream out her ecstasy, the moon peeking from between the asphalt-coloured clouds winked back at her conspiratorially. Dyson followed her closely with his own release and collapsed next to her ever careful not to put his full weight on her slender frame.

For a while they were both lying on their backs gazing up into the night ceiling and catching their breaths. Then Kenzi stretched a languid arm to tousle the wolf's curls playfully. "Lesson taken, Dy, forest is my friend, great sex trumps comfort and I am a foxy fox," she chirped, "But now I do need a shower." Dyson propped himself up on an elbow and observed his own muddy body, "No objection here. Next time I'll bring a blanket."

At the time of their night escapade Hale was nervously pacing the length of his improvised office down in Trick's lair. "It is my job to know everything about my fae-folk and yet it seems like I'm usually lagging behind," he grumbled to no one in particular but being the owner of the place as well as the only one present Trick felt obliged to answer. "You got a report on Halt's laboratory. Lauren is preparing a full inventory on the equipment seized, the knotty part will be to negotiate the redistribution of the materials with the Morrigan but that's called politics."

"The possibilities of using the lab for the goodness of all fae are to be discussed," Hale nodded in agreement, "I am gearing up for a sit-down with Evony on that account and Lauren is valueless help in this, but I was actually talking about friends, not politics. Kenzi?" The inflexion he put on the girl's name, both questioning and imperative, made Trick give an involuntary nod approval – that was the right Ash-tone to demand answers without stooping to pouring out a flood of questions. The Blood King, thinking he caught on to the nature of his young friend's concerns, started placatingly, "With the whirlwind of recent events I deemed it wise not to burden you with this for a while, but you seem to have got wind of that on your own."

"I still have my own, Blood King-independent, sources of information," Hale replied snappishly, "Didn't you think it was something I really needed to know?"

"I think you need to concentrate on extricating the Light from this mess and establishing a rapport with the Dark rather than emotionalize over Kenzi," Trick remarked judiciously, "You are the leader of the fae and your first duty is to them."

"Exactly," Hale's face suddenly broke in a grin. "And now that Kenzi is a fae, she has to pick a side and we both know which one it's gonna be. There will be no boundaries to cross then."

"She will certainly pick the Light," the bar-keep said a bit confused as to the boundaries mentioned, "apart from the obvious, the man she loves is a Light fae."

The siren's smile turned into a full-voltage beam, "That's what I am talking about. I am the leader of the Light but I am also a man and I think I can afford to make it my second duty to look after two particular Light fae's happiness."

"Well, they are happy together and don't need much looking-after, though I believe Kenzi's fae training is a challenge to meet," Trick answered with a light chuckle, "But Dyson will do his damnedest for her not to come to any harm."

Hale's mirth came to an abrupt end as he stared at his mentor in bewilderment and a budding consternation and Trick suddenly got a creepy feeling of talking at cross-purposes. "Kenzi and Dyson, they are in love. Dyson took her away to help her settle into her new fae-dom and them both to work out their relationship," he explained softly what he had thought was already known to the young Ash. Hale's expressive face was a mask of pain and horror, he shook his head in the last effort at disbelieve and fell down onto the couch, his shoulders slumping under the weight just brought onto them.

Trick gave a long-suffering sigh that was already becoming a habit. "When did I become the agony aunt for the young fae?" he mumbled and moved to put a sympathetic hand on the siren's still slouching shoulder. "You didn't know, did you?" he asked gently, "It all happened so fast and we all had so much on our collective and individual plates. You have feelings for Kenzi, but she loves another and I' sure you'll get over it, over her. You are the Ash, you have to pull yourself together … "

"And serve the interests of my people?" the younger fae finally looked up and at his mentor with a hint of resent in his eyes. "You sacrificed your family and your happiness for this and you want me to do the same?" Trick was momentarily taken aback and more than a little hurt but he rallied and replied sadly, "Nobody says the power to rule people and decide fates is easy – it's damn hard and it has a price – but you've made your choice, Hale. If you are feeling not up to it, we're in serious trouble."

At that point his attempts at comforting and coaching were quite welcomingly interrupted by the appearance of one absolutely gorgeous succubus. Dressed all in black, from the tips of her boot-shod toes to the upper hem of her low-cut tank top, Bo walked in with her usual confident stride heralding herself by calling her grandfather's name. Trick heaved a sigh of relief so deep that it sent a piece of parchment flying from the shelf in his line of exhale.

"Bo, so glad to see you," the bar-keep hurried to greet his granddaughter and dialed down into a frantic whisper, "Hale didn't know about Dyson and Kenzi and now I've told him he's freaking out. I'm absolutely out of my depth with this emotional stuff, can you take it over from here?" Bo couldn't help a smile at the sight of the Blood King wielding unprecedented power of sealing fates and laying down laws for a people but running for the hills from a clear-cut case of jealousy. "Chin up, Gramps!" she took pity on the man and moved around him to come up to the young Ash, still a statue of desperation on the couch. Trick judiciously took it as his cue out and rushed up the stairs to the main hall of the Dahl with the speed of someone who was for once unconcerned with looking dignified.

The succubus unceremoniously parked her delicious behind next to Hale and touched his sleeve. "Hey, how are you holding up?" she asked with worry and the siren looked her in the eye with a tormented expression that made Bo's heart constrict with sympathy. "I've just found out I've lost the girl I love to the man I thought was my friend," he said miserably.

"Don't be a drama queen," Bo answered with only a hint of a snap, "Kenzi was never yours, you have never spoken about your feelings to her and Dyson in no way betrayed you by falling in love with the girl."

"I knew they were close and hugging all the time but Dyson was forever yours and I thought I had time, I was about to come clean to Kenzi," Hale tried to explain his hurt, "I just never saw it coming, Bo."

"That's because you were never looking," Bo remarked, "As much as you have always tried to kick against your aristocratic faemily, deep down you are still lugging a great deal of their prejudice with you. Coincidentally enough, you were just about to fess up to Kenzi when you found out she had become a fae. Before that she seemed to be a bit too human for you. But Dyson never cared – he just loved her – as a human or as a fae."

Hale had the good grace to look down again, abashed, but the succubus was not done. "They are the two people I happen to love most in this whole world, Hale, and I want them to be happy even if it costs me a bruise or two on my ego. I have accepted the fact that my best friend and the only man I've ever loved are together. So should you."

"It took me so long to understand that I loved her, there was always something or someone in the way – another lover, a big evil to fight, you and Dyson stirring up things and then she nearly died fighting the Garuda and that made me realize my feelings. But then my Ash-dom was sprung upon me and I just couldn't turn it down – I am conditioned by generations of noblemen before me to put my people's interests before my own, I was born into power, Bo. I lost Kenzi when I became the Ash, I chose duty and authority over her," the siren laboured on, "But when she turned fae, I saw a way to retain my position and to get my girl and now seems like I was a blind fool to expect a girl like her to wait for me forever."

"Seems like you suck at making choices," Bo commiserated.

"But Dyson," Hale's mouth pressed into a hard line, "He took her without looking around, he who professed his eternal love to you. What was that bullshit about mating for life?"

"We have both betrayed our love too many times," the succubus answered despondently, "We couldn't reconcile our natural inclinations. I don't blame him. And you shouldn't either. You can't have Kenzi, Hale, but if you find it in your heart to let go, you can still have your two good friends." She patted Hale's shoulder consolingly and got up, "And now I need to talk to Trick about something and you do a bit of therapeutic sulking and come back to us with your usual adorable smile." Bo bent to give the siren a peck on the cheek and a tingle of her succubus juice as a pick-me-up and ambled out.

Hale followed her exit with his eyes lingering on her leather-hugged form as any able-boodied man would but once the succubus with her mesmerizing aura disappeared up the stairs he snapped back to his previous train of thought. The young Ash rose up and his face assumed the lofty and confident Ash-mask that for the first time since he started wearing it felt invigorating and full of possibilities rather than smothering. "My two good friends? I don't think so, Bo," he muttered darkly. "There is a girl I love and a man who dishonoured my sister once, departed from his principles and topped it up with betraying me. But the game is not over."


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Kenzi was masterfully mastertasking applying her eye makeup with a tiny mirror for guidance and fuming at the same time. "Can you believe that bastard's cheek, Dy?" she asked rhetorically when the wolf got into the driver's seat having deposited a bag of shopping into the boot. "The moment his wife's back is turned, he calls his slut of a lover and starts cooing into the cell. And that's a family man with small kids. Philandering skunk!"

Dyson followed Kenzi's accusatory finger with his eyes and saw a man standing by a family-sized sedan and talking animatedly on the phone to someone he kept calling _sweetie_. Kenzi's assumption that the sweetie in question wasn't his wife was born out when a woman exited the supermarket with a small bag of greens and the man immediately wrapped up the conversation and pasted a contrived smile onto his face.

The wolf, however, was not that partial to the couple's marital troubles so he gave an indifferent shrug. "I guess someone is putting her boosted hearing to a wrong use. Don's stick your foxy nose where it doesn't belong, babe, that is into human's affairs," he grunted.

"Still fresh are the memories of me being a human," the girl retorted, "and it's not like you yourself have always steered clear of what you call human affairs. You used to be really into humans, wolfboy."

"Look where it got me," Dyson drawled playfully looping his arm around Kenzi's shoulders lovingly.

"Exactly!" the girl shrugged his arm off keeping her eyes keenly on the owners of the sedan. The man was either not happy with the way he had to terminate the call or was dying for a tinkle as he glibly begged off to the gents and hurried across the parking lot to the outside restroom. The wife got into the car to wait and to call their family dentist to get an appointment for their youngest for later in the day.

"I bet he's after a booty call and not after a nature's call," Kenzi said excitedly, "he's gonna call his tart without a heart and fix up a date or something."

"People sometimes need to pee, Kenz," Dyson replied placatingly but the girl was on a roll. "I'm gonna find that out even under the penalty of being royally grossed-out," she vouched solemnly, hopped out of the car and trotted after the unfortunate philanderer before the wolf had time of think of a diversion. "Great!" Dyson commented, "Now we are on a skirt-chaser chase."

Kenzi, in the meantime, turned the corner of the little outbuilding, housing the facilities, and found herself before a door with the proud _Gents_ painted on it. She strained her ears and caught a muffled sound of her suspect's voice but couldn't get any particulars. The solution leapt to the eye as soon as Kenzi raised her head – there was a narrow open window about two metres up from the ground in the wall. Still a bit unsure of her not-so-long-ago acquired powers the girl decided on erring on the side of caution and took a considerable running start to scale the wall. In one leap she perched herself on the flat roof and, securing her body with her feet tucked firmly into a raindrain groove, the girl lowered herself head-down into a hanging position to peek inside the restroom with her hands gripping the window frame for extra purchase. Her circumscribed visibility range gave her two stalls one of which was occupied, though not for its assigned use. Kenzi's mark, unaware of her prosecution, was sitting on the lowered toilet seat and pouring charm into his cell. Kenzi's female fox intuition was spot-on – he was arranging for a rendez-vous taking advantage of his wife's shouldering the dentist visit.

"Cheating scumbag!" the girl muttered disdainfully toying with an idea of enlightening the poor wife as to her husband's true colours. Somehow, though, the option didn't seem to present a fair consolation for the woman or an adequate retribution for the man. "At least, peeing was only a pretext and I am not being treated to the sight," Kenzi muttered darkly and at that precise moment the man finished sweet-talking his paramour and flipping his cell shut got down to business appropriate to the surroundings – that is started unzipping his fly.

"Damn!" the girl swore under her breath and continued on her harangue cranking uo her voice volume slightly in the grip of justified anger, "First you wronged one woman now you go on to utterly disgust another – quite a lady's man. I should've sent Dyson on this loo-connaissance. How many women's sheets and fates in general have been stained by your penis, douchebag! I wish you lost your implement in your pants!"

After this hearty tirade Kenzi was just about to pull herself up and onto the roof to reflect upon what she could do with the situation at hand when she heard a soul-rending cry of horror and stuck her head right back into the window. The man who was the cause of the young fae's toilet climbing mission was standing with his pants down and looking in a complete terrified stupor down at precisely the spot where his much-referred to tool of sin was supposed to be located. "Where is it?" the man started whining making hand-passes over his crotch, "No-no, I can't find it. Where is it?!" His tone was growing progressively more high-pitched and miserable until it reached a practically one-month-kitty pitiful intensity.

Kenzi stilled in her bat-like position and it took her a couple of seconds to get a grasp on what was going on. But when the understanding at last sunk in the girl gave full vent to mischievous mirth bubbling in her. She was laughing so hard that at one point her arms lost their hold on the roof and she fell head-first down. She should've put some effort in landing on her feet cat-style but the familiar scent hit her nostrils seconds before she was about to execute the stunt – with serene confidence Kenzi let herself fall right into Dyson's strong waiting arms. She was still hiccupping with laughter while he was carrying her back to the car and shoving her none too gently back into the passenger seat.

"What have you done?" the wolf wheeled round on her once he belted her up an inch too tightly. "What's with the dude?"

"Guess he's looking for his dick," the girl replied in between breathing exercises to suppress further giggles. "That was amazing, D-man, I was hanging there really livid and all and then I wished the cheating asshole lost his cock and he did! As if he had heard me! He was standing there groping for his family heirloom and finding none. You should've seen his mug!"

Dyson seemed absolutely indifferent to the fate of the human Casanova's male member but intrigued by this display of the girl's fae power range. "Powers of suggestion?" he wondered knitting his brow, "Powers of illusion? How did you convey it? Orally or telepathetically? Can you affect only humans or fae as well? Oh, we need Trick or Lauren or both!"

"That is if the Hotpants is still mobile after the succusessions and if Trick hasn't yet discovered I swiped the bottle of his fairy brew from Avalon meadows or some such – potent stuff I can tell you! My Russian liver would've combusted had it not been kitsuned-up!" Kenzi chirped in glee.

In a sharp move Dyson turned to her and cupped her face in his hands locking his eyes with hers. "A kenzi plus a kitsune makes up an inflammable mixture," he growled softly, "dangerous as a wild fire I was taught as a kid to run away from cause it can burn a wolf to a crisp."

"I'll never burn you," the grey of the girl's eyes melted into a warm silver and she weaved her slender fingers into his curls, "you'll be warm, kept on your toes but never burnt. My fire would extinguish without you. Maybe I am turning wild but I'm certainly yours."

The moment of uncovered emotion was broken by the wolf's smirk, he pointed a finger through the wind-shield. "Look, here's your victim!" he said softly. The penis-losing man had appeared at the parking lot in a beeline to his car and his wife who was already starting to worry about her husband's prolonged toilet-break. The man was holding his hands in his oddly rippling pockets as if he was constantly feeling for something inside his pants and judging by the stupefied relief flooding his features the something he had been seeking was already retrieved.

"Don't think the little incident will mend their family but at least the jerk will take his sweet time before screwing around again," Kenzi announced in an upbeat tone.

"I'm starting to think it's high time we got back to civilization," Dyson remarked less amused, "seems like your physical training is well-advanced. So, we'll need to concentrate on your manners next. And frankly, I am no faetiquette expert."

"If only I had known before that all I needed to persuade you to stop playing hermits was to de-penis someone," the girl sighed ruefully and livened up immediately. "When are we leaving?"

"I figure end of the week will be about time. I'll call Trick first, get the lay of the land," the shifter said. "You mean get the lay count of Bo?" Kenzi inquired sweetly.

"That might also be pertinent information, babe," Dyson chortled. "Rule of thumb in dealing with a succubus is to get the ins and outs on her bedroom front."

"You think she is mad at us?" the girl's voice dropped to a sad whisper.

"No, I think she is sincerely happy for us and I think she is tied-up in another blonde triangle," the wolf replied, "but as you've already experienced first-hand fae are complex and often unpredictable to the others as well as to themselves. Last time I talked to Trick he seemed to be worried about something, nothing specific, you know the old schemer, but he did hint that we should be careful not to tread on sore toes more than it's strictly necessary when we return."

"Do you think he meant Bo?" Kenzi's eyes opened up in disbelief.

"I don't know, love," Dyson grunted before pressing down the accelerator. "We might find it out before the week is out."

In fact, they were to start finding it out a little earlier as the wolf's cell vibrated soon after they took the last turning out of the town. Dyson took a hand off the wheel to put the phone to his ear. "Hale, buddy, or should I go with your Ash-ness," he laughed with evident happiness. "I've been missing your pool skills, it's been a while I haven't cleaned anyone out." His smile faded a bit while he was listening to his ex-partner, then he nodded gravely and stated succinctly, "Sure, we'll be there tomorrow, mate."

"What is it?" Kenzi asked concerned by her lover's frown.

"Hale's having a spot of trouble. Seems like there's a spate of fae murders and I might be the right person to deal with them," the shifter explained. "We'll have to cut our leave even shorter."

"Not like I'm gonna miss the mosquitoes or the nettles," the girl agreed lightly, "But why do they need you? Doesn't the Ash have enough faecops in town? Is Tamsin in restricted use, succubus only?"

"Hale thinks that the murderer might be someone I used to know many years ago, someone I stand the best chance of catching," Dyson elaborated reluctantly. "Someone I thought was as deadly as he was dead."

"Our first case as a double-fae team," Kenzi squealed in delight and fore-stalled the wolf's objection from making their way out by a sweet reminder, "You've just seen what an enraged kenzune is capable of, honey, don't get me started on it's-too-dangerous or something."

"I was kinda hoping to do a lone hunt with you safely tucked in our home cooking dinner," Dyson joked.

"Which reminds me, can I start renovating your loft? It's so doom and gloom, pink would definitely cheer up the atmosphere," the girl gushed merrily. "With time on my hands I can totally make it over."

The shifter gave a painful wince and replied quickly, "Your enhanced powers of persuasion, Kenzi. We are on the case together."


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Kenzi burst into the Dahl like a rocket on an anti-terrorist mission and made a beeline for her bestie who she leapt onto with a squeal of glee. "Bo-bobo!" she exclaimed flinging her arms around the curvaceous parts of the succubus, "I've just upgraded you to a triple Bo, have you noticed? I've missed you even more than Trick's free cheap booze. Cheap refers to the quality, T-man, no offence". The fae in question shook his head with a condescending amusement. "Seems like one of the powers she's acquired is a burst of gabbing speed," he murmured in an aside to Dyson who came to lean against the counter watching the girls with a grin.

Bo returned the younger girl's fervent hug without a second's doubt and finally disentangling form their embrace weaved her fingers through Kenzi's hair. "For Fae's sake, what have you done with your Goth locks, Kenz?" she asked in mock horror causing her friend to pout. "A side-effect from turning kitsune. Next thing I'm probably gonna grow a tail and a set of elf pointy ears," she complained, "this fox business is ruining my look." The succubus chortled with laughter at the sight of Kenzi's despondency. "That's so like you! After all you've been through your pet worry is the colour of your hair! Anyways, glad to have my Kenziest Kenzi ever back!" she added with feeling and the girl locked her blue eyes with the deep brown of the woman's searching for any undercurrents.

"So, we're good? I mean, me coming back all bright and breezy after an extended exposure to your ex's charms and other attributes," she asked cautiously. There was not a glimmer of hesitation in Bo's face when she put her both arms on the girl's shoulders and gave them a light squeeze to reinforce the message. "We will always be good, Kenz. Unless you intend to keep snatching my blondes away and then I might go hungry and angry."

"Nay, you can keep your girls," Kenzi replied magnanimously, "As far as I am concerned, they lack the essential bit to make this Kenzi happy."

During their light-hearted, though meaningful exchange, Dyson took the opportunity to give Trick a rundown on the new kitsune's progress. "So, she's fairly at home with her senses and physicality and getting the first glimpses of her mind-affecting powers," the Blood King recapped. "Any detectable personality changes?"

"Well, we can't expect her to remain one-hundred-percent the same Kenzi as she used to be as a human," the shifter said evasively, "My take is some of her natural qualities have also got a boost-up, like her mischievous sense of humour, and she occasionally has control issues, but she is Kenzi all right."

The catching-up was interrupted by the appearance by a tall behatted figure with a pearl-white broad smile firmly fixed in place. "Hale! Your Ashity!" Kenzi shrieked and gave him a hearty wave, "Come join this huggy session!"

The siren approached the group and did the required hug thing after which he proceeded to exchange handshakes with the men. "Kenzi, Dyson, glad you're back!" he said with utmost sincerity keenly aware that Bo and her grandfather were watching his face closely and not without suspicion. The wolf and the fox, however, greeted their dear friend without reservation, Dyson pumping his hand and looping an arm around his shoulders in a brotherly fashion whereas Kenzi executed a complicated maneuver of bumping her fist into his chest lightly while stroking his cheek with her other hand. "I so missed seeing a snappily-dressed man in the backwater paradise Dyson dragged me to," she announced and beamed at the siren. Hale's hopes got a momentary lift under the tender look Kenzi gave him but were immediately grounded when the girl retreated into the wolf's embrace with a look of happy satisfaction. "This one here," she patted Dyson's mid-riff with a twinkle in her eye, "is definitely much better at undressing than dressing."

The young Ash's heart painfully constricted but with the ease of a hereditary politician he assumed an expression of amiability at their display of intimacy.

Dyson tore his eyes off his little fox with a considerable effort and tried to focus on the urgent matters despite the distracting pressure of Kenzi's hands against his body. "As far as it's a bit too early in the day to start celebrating I suggest we get down to business. You called me, Hale, and seems like for a damn good reason," he said gravely.

The siren nodded relieved at the possibility of letting the contrived smile fall off his face. "We've had a series of human and fae killings, 23 in total so far, that bear all the signs of a wolf-shifter's MO," he started weightily. "Moreover, a very particular wolf-shifter's MO. The throats remained for the most part untouched but …" He looked over at Trick as if inviting him to pick up the tale, which the Blood King did.

"The hearts were ripped out from the humans and the livers from the fae," he continued the gruesome account, "and there were two sightings reported of an enormous red-haired wolf near the crime scenes."

"Courtaud?!" Dyson exclaimed his usual I've-seen-it-all calm expression changing to one of horrified disbelief, "But that's impossible, it must be a copycat! He was imprisoned in the maximum-security facility in France 250 years ago or something. I thought he should have died by now."

"I am afraid, Dyson, he is very much alive and my French opposite number let him escape a couple of years ago and failed to inform the other Ashes about it," Hale gritted, "And now the homicidal wolf-maniac turned up this side of the Atlantic and started a massacre. Even the Morrigan is concerned – some of the killed fae were Dark."

"So, this Courtow is not discriminating," Bo remarked with an unhappy smirk, "organ-harvesting without regard to race or affiliation."

"Courtaud," Trick corrected automatically. "And actually his victims of choice are young human females. Most of the fae kills so far have been accidental – witnesses or fools who crossed him."

"And you need Dyson because?" Kenzi chipped in cutting to what was the heart of the mater for her personally. Hale looked sideways while Trick chose that particular moment to attend to a stained glass on the counter. "Dy?" the girl switched her attention together with the questioning inflection onto her frowning lover.

"It was me who captured and nearly killed Courtaud in 1767," the shifter elaborated in a measured tone, "And the fact that he pops up after his prison break in my city of residence might not be a coincidence."

"You mean to say the human-hating psycho is after revenge," Kenzi did the spelling-out, "And your best friend Hale here, who also happens to be the leader of the Light with unlimited resources at his disposal, chose to drag you from the relative safety of the boring backwater hideout right into the thick of things. Cute!" She turned to face the siren with an expression if barely suppressed fury.

Hale trued to take her hand in his but the girl jerked it away indignantly. "Kenzi, Dyson is the only light fae to have ever bested Courtaud and he's also a wolf-shifter with the strength, skills and experience to rival Courtaud's. We need him to catch the maniac, lives are at stake," the Ash reasoned but the girl was not to be easily placated. She was about to launch into another heated reproach when the wolf's warm hand took confident possession of her forearm. "You wouldn't expect me to hide while Courtaud is peppering the city with dead bodies, my love?" he said softly, "Hale is right, I can help capture him and stop the terror. And if he's got a personal agenda that's all the more reason to fight." Kenzi's face mellowed and she sighed in defeat.

"I'm sorry, Hale, for yelling at you," she apologized regaining equilibrium, "You couldn't have done otherwise."

The siren cheered up and ventured a crooked half-smile. "I am equally sorry to have ruined your vacation, Li'l Mama, but I need your furry knight to land his clawy hand with this. As soon as the killer is caught, I'll return him to you. In the meantime, I suppose it'd be best for Kenzi to join Lauren at the compound under protection of the Ash and his guards."

Kenzi gave a low, quite unladylike, whistle, "Hel-lo? Someone is being not the sharpest hat in the closet. I am not gonna sit on my exquisite ass with Dc Bore-me-to-death while Dyson is out there catching the patented psycho. First, I'm not human any longer. Second, the man I love is risking his head. Third, I am Kenzi. Enough said."

A chill of unease ran down Hale's spine, that was not what he had counted on. He turned to the wolf for support but Dyson only sighed in submission, "Believe me, we've done enough arguing on that score with her. Bottom line, she is fae-strong now and she is stubborn as always. Seems safer to keep her in my sights than let her act up on her own."

Suddenly Bo gave a jolt as if hit by electricity and turned towards the entrance where a few seconds later materialized the tall blonde valkyrie with an attitude and the Kenziesque snark.

"Tamsin? What are you doing here?" the succubus greeted the woman whose aura she sensed feet away with false indifference that deceived nobody. "I've just got a call from the Morrigan," the valkyire drawled, "Ruined my cognac-ed coffee. Said the Ash's little helpers could do with a bit of begrudging assistance. She didn't even ask me to get a pampers pack for the baby Ash on the way. What might have ruffled the Super bitch so much?"

"Rather a who," Dyson told his dark partner, "I believe you've heard of the Beast of Gevaudan?"

Tamsin winced painfully, "I thought he was contained."

"He was until an incompetent French Ash let him slip through his fingers and conveniently forgot to alert the rest of the fae-world," Hale couldn't resist slamming his overseas colleague one more time.

Bo, having successfully fought down the uncomfortable blush Tamsin's arrival had provoked, decided to start giving the case her full attention. "Now seems the time for the old fae to enlighten the new fae about this French beast of whatever," she demanded.

Dyson looked from Trick to Tamsin but they both deferred to him in the task of delivering the gory details. "Courtaud is a wolf-shifter born in France in 11th century, he was strong and vicious and soon became the leader of the pack, rumour has it, shortly after killing his farther and his brother, who was also a claimant to the position. He hand-picked his pack members out of the most ruthless killers and rapidly gained quite a reputation. His pack started out as mercenaries but refused to serve one king and were travelling around Europe taking on the assignments others were too squeamish or principled to agree to. Over time, however, Courtaud and his pack seemed to be spiraling down from unnecessary violence and ruthless disregard for life to virulent, psychotic sadism. The apex of their gang activity came in 1450 when crazy from blood-thirst they blew into Paris and killed and ate about 40 people. Their man-eating spree would have claimed many more lives if the dwellers of the city hadn't rallied under a leadership of a determined personality and lured the pack into a trap where they managed to kill all the wolves." Dsyon stopped to catch a breath and looked over at Tamsin.

"Not all of them, obviously or we wouldn't be sitting here now," the blonde woman grumbled and went on urged by the shifter's gaze, "I was in Paris at the time on a vacation, taking a break from the battlefield, or so I thought, and getting straight into another bloodbath as it turned out. When the cook of the inn I was staying in turned up dead and I had to skip dinner I got cranky and decided to give the terrified populace a nudge and play Joan d'Arc. At that time I was calling myself Thomas Maureau for ease of reference as it was not quite recommended for women to travel alone. Not a pretty sight with my hair cut short, my boobs tightly bandaged and a sock stuffed into my fly front but my disguise held water and the good Parisians chinned up enough to corner the pack in front of the Notre Dame and speared and stoned the wolves to death. But the red wolf Courtaud was too strong and too fast and he escaped."

"Escaped to reappear to the human world as the beast of Gevaudan three hundred years later. He started killing people in the south of France and the body count came up to over two hundred ripped and shredded people before I was contracted to find and execute or contain the mad fae," Dyson repicked the story. "I finally succeeded where many human hunters and quite a few fae ones had failed before me. I tracked and fought Courtaud and I mauled him badly enough to deliver him into custody of the local Ash."

"How did you manage to overpower him?" Tamsin asked curiously, "I've seen him in action and no offence, partner, that should've been a tie."

"I cheated," Dyson smiled unhappily, "I pretended to be an admiring follower of his, played into his sense of loneliness and the need for a pack every wolf carries deep down and managed to get close enough. Then it was a bit of silver powder into his eyes and my A-game brought into the mix."

"We'll need to come up with a new trick," Kenzi said meditatively. "An angry stone-throwing mob and Dyson playing negotiator won't work this time."


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

The whole merry gang spent hours pouring over the case files looking for leads or ideas or anything to whip up a decent plan of campaign.

"The one point is Courtaud seems to display quite a predilection for young humans," Bo started.

"The fresh hearts without a thick coat of cholesterol taste that much better," Kenzi commented grimly studying a picture of a dark-haired girl missing that vital part of anatomy and thrown into a dumpster. "But why fae livers? Does he think the fae alcohol consumption is lower? Going by what I've seen at the Dhal he is under a severe misapprehension."

"There is an old belief that by eating your enemy's liver you are acquiring their strength and wisdom," Dyson remarked absent-mindedly focused on the map of the city with the murder sites marked. "I think we can deduce a pattern in his choice of hunting grounds. He picked most of his victims in busy parts of the city within a few block radius from the Trinity park zone downtown. I would say he doesn't want to stray too far from the trees – it's his comfort zone, he may have a lair there."

"We should scour the park zone then," Bo butted in decisively, "Find his lair, kill the maniac in his bed so to say."

"Really?" Dyson arched a skeptic eyebrow, "You want to hunt a wolf down on his own turf? That's a kamikaze mission if there is any. All of you city-dwellers don't stand a chance and I'll be severely disadvantaged against someone who's had plenty of time to study every grass blade in the vicinity."

"Ok, then we search the bars and clubs in the neighbourhood, that's where he is most likely looking for his prey. He is hunting at night so he needs people who go out, he needs night revelers. We cruise the night spots, find the wolf and get him to a nicely secluded place," Bo stated with her usual endearing confidence. "Lure him where we need him. I can totally do the luring," the succubus face lit up with a seductive smile, "As experience shows wolves are particularly susceptible to my charms."

"As experience shows human charm can sometimes trump the succucharm, Bobo," Kenzi snarked with a wink, "Guess, I can also do the luring given the fact our psycho has a taste for human girls."

"You keep forgetting you are not human any longer," Lauren reminded her but the young kitsune brushed off her words, "I may not be one, but I can well pretend to be one. Tell them, wolfboy, about my deception skills."

"Not much to tell yet," Dyson grumbled, "But she can certainly mask her fae smell. She tried that on me once. She actually managed to ambush me in our lake cabin. I was totally unaware of her presence till she chose to make it known." The shifter elaborated no further on how she chose to make her presence known or on what followed the ambush but the glance he exchanged with Kenzi was full of twinkling memory of that particular sexident.

"So the cannibal doesn't smell a fae on me, pegs me down for a defenseless human and follows me meekly into a trap. How does that sound to you?" the girl went on warming to her idea.

"So, you offer Kenzi up as a bait?" Hale intervened for the first time since the beginning of this council of war. "What if you can't make it to her in time and Courtaud hurts her?" he looked Dyson squarely in the face.

"Why don't you seem similarly concerned for me?" Bo interfered almost offended by his oversight, "I am also going to play bait."

"You are much stronger. And Kenzi is still young and inexperienced as a fae," the Ash persisted.

"Tamsin and I will keep as close to them both as we can, Hale. Besides, I've seen Kenzi in action, she has become strong and fast, she can handle herself," the wolf answered a bit taken aback by the vehemence of the siren's tone and the sourness of his face.

"I am getting down to making a list of possible places," Trick spoke up from behind his book-strewn desk, "You can split into two search parties for quicker coverage of the territory and start the hunt."

Tamsin's eyebrows shot up in a quizzical expression, "Two search parties?"

"Yes, you and Dyson know Courtaud by sight and he knows you. Would be sensible for you to partner up with someone who hasn't met him yet," the Blood King explained his idea.

"Oh, I'd love to pair up with Tammy here, she's such a ray of light. And Dyson can go with Bo for the sake of good old times," Kenzi's eyes were positively shining with mirth when she saw the pronounced lack of enthusiasm at her suggestion among some of the merry gang members. "Or should we draw straws?" she went on coyly.

Tamsin shrugged her shoulders with all the indifference she could muster, "I don't care either way – the skinny or the curvy – as long as I get to skin the maniac with the bluntest of my knife collection."

"Then why don't you stick to Kenzi for a change," Lauren hurried to step in, "You've been spending enough time with Bo lately." The blonde doctor threw the succubus a pained look and saw the brunette give a weary sigh.

"And what useful things will you be occupying yourself with while we are sticking our necks out?" the valkyrie hissed not even trying to hide her animosity towards the human. "Super dangerous microscope study or strenuous keyboard operations?"

The succubus, who had been swinging her brown eyes from one woman to the other, decided to interfere on behalf of her clearly disconcerted blonde lover. "Cut it out, Tamsin. You know that what Lauren is doing is no less important than all our butt-kicking. She'll be at her lab in case any of us plays it dumb and needs stitching up."

"So, all's set," Dyson summed up picking up the map from the table and tearing it neatly into two halves, "Trick keeps collecting intelligence, Lauren polishes her tools in anticipation of a fae to patch up, me and Bo go east, Tamsin and Kenzi go west. Radios on stand-by, communication encouraged." "Hale…well, Hale is doing his Ash thing and looking mighty smart in his suit," he finished with a smile which his former partner did not return. Instead, the siren pulled out a small case from behind the arm-chair, he had been leaning against, and hoisted it on the desk. He clicked the clasps open and lifted the lid to reveal four guns on the red velvet cover.

"Courtesy of the Ash armoury. Each gun is custom-made, each bullet is made of silver," the siren announced solemnly and with his own hand passed a gun to each of his hunters suitably impressed by his foresight, "the much-feared faetal metal, the only one capable of inflicting a lasting damage onto a wolf-shifter as Dyson here can attest. As soon as any of you get within hitting range, circumstances allowing, shoot the bastard down."

"I'll have to admit to feeling a bit better about the whole adventure," Kenzi whispered running a hand lightly over the muzzle of the gun and stuffing it into her purse. Tamsin unceremoniously tucked hers into her shoulder-holster and turned to the shorter girl, "Being stuck with you counteracts the beneficial effect of the weapon," she groused not to break a long-standing snarking habit.

"Take my word for it, she is a weapon in itself," Dyson draped a warm hand around Kenzi's shoulders and pulled her in for a kiss, "Take good care of her, partner," he asked the valkyrie sincerely missing a withering glance his Ash sent him at that very moment.

The gang exchanged the good-luck hugs and handshakes and thus geared-up and pepped went their separate ways to start the hunt for the lethal psychotic fae. Trick returned to his parchment-perusal and Hale went up to the window to observe the short slender figure hop into the car with the grace of a dancer or an animal. "I will take good care of her, partner," he echoed the recently heard words.

Twenty minutes later Bo and Dyson entered the bar not far from which the first murder had taken place and squeezed their way through the crowd to an unostentatious table in the corner to survey the clientele. Dyson took a few deep sniffs and swept the surroundings with a cautious gaze. "Mostly humans, no Courtaud as far as I can smell above the alcohol, sweat and cheap perfume," he reported to his companion, "So, we wait a bit and move on. Not the soundest strategy, but the best we can do under the circumstances is to play on probabilities and hope for chances."

Bo leaned forward with her elbows and a significant part of her cleavage on the table, "And while we are waiting, you can get a start on your blow-by-blow account of your honeymoon with my best friend."

"Nice try, Bo," the wolf gave a short laugh, "But it was not a honeymoon and you are not getting an account of whatever it was."

"Spoilsport," the succubus pouted, "Your only saving grace is that Kenzi looks so happy that I am ready to forgive you anything."

Dyson couldn't help a smug grin but immediately straightened his face to ask in a serious tone, "And you? Are you happy, Bo? How is it going with Lauren? She was a bit tense."

"I don't know, Dyson, I seem to be perpetually stuck in a multi-angled geometrical figure," the succubus complained, "Is it my nature or my curse or a bit of both? I love Lauren, but it's getting increasingly difficult to do it. Since the Halt incident she's been overstrung, insecure, jealous. And Tamsin ... ."

"You have feelings for her too?" the shifter asked.

"I feel like a toddler in front of an ice-cream stand," Bo confessed in a low voice, "What to choose – strawberry or vanilla? Both delicious, both equally mouth-watering and whichever you take you'll be bound to doubt or regret your choice and torment yourself with what-if."

"So don't make a choice until you're sure of it," Dyson gently advised, "It's not about knowing which one you love as it's quite in your nature to love two at the same time, it's about you knowing which one you can't live without. Don't commit until it becomes like a choice between a vanilla ice-cream and a glass of water. Both delicious in their own way but only one indispensible to sustain life."

"The last thing I expected was to be counselled in my relationship in such a metaphor-heavy way by an emotionally inhibited, verbally gauche wolf," the succubus smirked patting Dyson's arm in warm gratitude.

"It's Kenzi rubbing off on me," he chortled back internally surprised at his own total lack of response at the brunette's touch to his bare skin.

The Kenzi herself at that time was attempting to conduct a similar heart-to-heart but the subject of her grilling was much less favourably disposed to outpourings. Tamsin proved to be immune to the younger girl's drawing-out powers and steadfastly refused to discuss Bo or the matters of the heart altogether. Frustrated and huffing Kenzi declared the valkyrie to be a tight-laced old maid as in literary old and literary a maid. "You've never been married, have you?" she remarked repaying the lack of confidence with a taunt, "No big surprise, seeing you are sticking to girls and same-sex marriages haven't been around for that long." Kenzi was about to elaborate on why the male part of the fae-kind should be grateful for Tamsin's sexual proclivities when her cell sent a shiver through the thin fabric of her jeans.

"Hale?" the kitsune asked with astonishment hearing the familiar voice, "What's up, bro? Missed me already?" But the lightness evaporated swiftly as Kenzi was listening to the Ash and on hanging up she sprang from her seat and grabbed the blonde's hand. "Hurry up, iron maiden, Hale's just got a sighting on Courtaud, another end of the city, a club called _Night Rose_." And the girls left their current vantage point at a run and jumped into the car without exchanging a snark or doubting a word of their fae-ruling friend.

In the meanwhile, Dyson and Bo were making their exit out of the third club on their list of possibilities. "Maybe we're doing it the wrong way?" Dyson mused aloud, "Maybe bars are the wrong places after all? Put yourself into Courtaud's shoes. He's been surviving on prison food for the last 250 years, he escapes salivating at the thought of getting a proper hot meal and finds himself in the world of alcohol, nicotine and fast food-infected meat. Would night clubs seem culinary appealing?"

"Your carnivorous reasoning makes sense," Bo agreed, "What do you have in mind?"

"Something working late hours and with healthy-living people," the wolf verbalized his half-formed idea.

"A sports club? A yoga studio?" the succubus nodded vigorously, "And there can't be that many around." She flipped out her cell and dialed a number. "Lauren, we need your googling skills right now…"


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter 6

That was the second yoga studio in the neighbourhood that Lauren had supplied on the phone. The doors of the big-windowed one-storey were just opening to discharge the diligent students not averse to moon-lit practicing.

"Look!" Bo tugged Dyson's sleeve and pointed at one of the girls with a yoga mat rolled under her arm separating from the group and going her way down the street. "She is alone and she looks strikingly similar to the third human victim. Do you this wack-job has a type?"

"Was never curious on that score, but that's worth a shot. Give her a minute's headstart and follow, I'll be bringing up the rear to lessen the chance of Courtaud sniffing me out," Dyson instructed the succubus and Bo slipped out of the car to track the girl discretely along the quickly darkening street. Dyson watched the woman's retreating back and swinging hips – beast takedown mission or not Bo was not toning down on her curvaceously mouth-watering femininity. The effect on him, however, seemed to have significantly reduced since Kenzi happened to him.

The succubus strolled taking care to minimize the clicking sounds of her heels on the sidewalk. The girl in front of her, relaxed and unhurried after her training, was making an easy job of being following and an easy mark, as the fae thought to herself. Another dozen of feet and Bo felt a change in the air – a relieved certainty of having her hunch verified and a stifling premonition coming over her in a single wave. The girl also must have heard or sensed something for she swept a slightly nervous glance around but continued walking until she approached a narrow entrance to a side alley – a classical crime scene to be avoided at all costs by lonely night-walking defenseless girls but the yoga-fan hadn't heeded the Little-Red-Riding-Hood warnings.

The moment she leveled with the alley an enormous figure leapt out of it and grabbed the girl in one powerful slash of what Bo recognized to be claws of a half-turned wolf. The succubus sprinted after them confident Dyson would have picked up on the noises of the attack already. Bo burst into the alley to stall before a blood-curdling tableau of a huge man with his eyes burning amber and his fangs and claws at the ready bending over the limp bleeding human on the ground.

"Freeze! In the name of the Ash!" Bo yelled not sure of the procedure but certain that was not the time to read him his Miranda. The man looked up at her in a display of frank and amused astonishment. He drew in a sharp breath and mumbled something in French, then his lips cracked into a ghoulish smile distorted by his protruding fangs. Bo made a mental note to advise Dyson never to try to smile when fanged and jerked her gun from under her belt, but Courtaud proved to be hellishly fast and astoundingly well-coordinated for such a broad man. The brunette had only time to hear a swish of air and the gun was smacked clean out of her hand and she herself found herself kissing the dirt with her now bleeding lips and an arm ripped open. The succubus flipped onto her back her left hand simultaneously going down to her boot for her loyal knife. That was a move the red wolf hadn't anticipated and paid for it when the blade pierced his chest. He roared his pain and fury and recoiled, which gave Bo the chance to pick herself off the ground, her head spinning from the impact and her vision swimming.

That was when she felt Dyson's hands on her shoulders steadying her and pushing her on towards the injured human female. "Go help her, she's dying," he snarled, "I'll distract the beast." Bo dashed to the blood-soaked spot where the unfortunate girl was seemingly breathing her last while Dyson positioned himself so as to cut Courtaud from the girls.

"Dyson, fancy meeting you here, _mon ami_," the red wolf drawled conversationally though his fighting stance and flashing teeth belied the civility of his words. "Dutiful officer of the law trying to arrest me for the second time."

"Last time I succeeded and I'm gonna do it again," the other growled in open animosity. "But first I'll hurt you the way you've hurt my friend here." Fully aware of Courtaud's extraordinary strength Dyson was taking no chances when he drew his special wolf-hunting gun and took aim. When a minute ago Bo had wielded her firearm the red wolf was not particularly frightened by the brunette's attack but this opponent knew better than try and stop him with a usual weapon. Courtaud made the mental math quick enough and responded accordingly. Rather then fight when at an obvious disadvantage, he in a blink of an eye fully turned and in a stupefying leap cleared the brick wall of the alley.

"He's fleeing," the shifter yelled to Bo tucking the precious firearm back into his shoulder holster and ripping off his jacket, "I am going after him. Are you two all right there?" He took an extra couple of seconds to look over at the girls. Bo was pale and sported a gash on her shoulder, the girl on the ground started to cough her way back to life. "Go!" the succubus urged him, "I'm fine, I've fed her some of my chi and she's coming round. I'll call the human ambulance and follow you soon."

"Call Tams and Kenzi!" he grunted and took a run-up to the wall to jump and hitch himself over its edge on to the other side. The hurdle cleared the shifter found himself on a waste-land of an abandoned construction site with cement blocks and metal rods jutting here and there. Dyson smelled the air though he knew well enough without the olfactory data input that the red wolf had not strayed far from this place full of hiding places and ambush possibilities. Dyson realized Courtaud had an edge on him as far as their senses were concerned but couldn't afford to fully turn as his capture plan hinged on the silver bullets in the not paw-friendly gun.

The Light fae made his cautious way through the wasteland registering every small sound or smell and fully alive to the fact that a mistake with an opponent like the crazy red wolf would entail a hell to pay. So, Dyson was dead-set on not making such a mistake.

A slight crack to the left dismissed as a rat, a whiff from the right identified immediately as that of a stray dog and at last Dyson struck gold – a barely perceptible rustle and a ghost of a movement and the light-fae wolf lunged with his gun drawn at his quarry. Courtaud's move to circle the shifter and attack from the behind fell pathetically flat when he found himself staring at the muzzle of a gun juiced-up, as he was sure, with proper ammunition.

"History repeats itself," Courtaud smirked a weird light switching on in his feral eyes. "You and me in a deadlock. Just the way I had been imagining it for over a hundred years in the grim dudgeon provided by my Ash."

"You'll have ample opportunity to keep imagining for the rest of your lifetime," Dyson gritted out and raised the gun, "I am asking you for the sake of the form to come with me peacefully."

"You know that it's futile," the French responded and his long right hand shot out to seize a piece of steel pipe lying invitingly a mere foot away. A shot splintered the night air and Courtaud pressed his left hand to his right shoulder which was slowly dripping blood but didn't drop the pipe. An odd grin crinkled his features, his heavily accented voice openly mocking the other fae, "Really, Dyson? You are that stupid. You and your appetizing girl-friend brandishing your guns as if they were a death-threat! And you didn't even bother to bring some silver with you!" He slowly lifted his hand to reveal a rapidly mending shoulder.

An uncomfortable chill skipped down Dyson's spine counting the vertebrae and internally he cursed heatedly to even out the temperatures. Why hadn't he checked the gun beforehand? The shifter fired another shot that hit Coutaud in the thigh and the second bullet again failed to impress the red psycho. With another colourful expletive Dyson discarded the now-useless weapon and fully shifted, so did his enemy. The two wolves squared off crouching low to the ground and moving in a small-radius circle gearing up for the high-stakes combat.

_Night Rose _looked so perfectly peaceful and bustlingly populated that Kenzi immediately declared it a suitable crime scene and the girls set off on a recce walk-around and ask-around. After half an hour of endeavours Tamsin came up blank and was on the brink of giving up on the place – there was not a trace of the psychotic red wolf, no one was missing a clubbing companion and the patrons were all paired up or clustered into companies. Right then Kenzi appeared at her side tugging her excitedly by the sleeve.

"Hey, sista, look who I have dredged up," she announced proudly and pushed forward a minuscule weedy man of indeterminate age with a mild face. "He claims he saw our guy not long ago."

Tamsin did her signature frown and trained a menacing stare at the witness. "Spill!"

"As I've already told your friend I saw a very tall broad man with red hair coming in here about an hour ago," the man started his tale in whiny tones, "He was sitting at that table and watching the crowd, girls in particular with a hungry look. I smelled him for a fae, a wolf-shifter to be precise, and was surprised that he was paying attention to humans. If he was about to hunt humans that would reflect badly on the neighbourhood and this place has the best ale in the district. First I meant to ask him whether he was Dark or Light but then thought better of it."

"Meaning you pussied out," Kenzi cut in unceremoniously.

The man shrugged his shoulders resignedly, "What can I say, I am a peaceful leprechaun, not a bouncer. But I called in the Ash's service and reported him. Then I got a call back that instructed me to wait for you two and give you the low-down."

"Where is he now?" Tamsin looked around the huge densely-packed dance hall with a ripple of shifting bodies.

"I don't know but he went to the gents just before you arrived," the leprechaun supplied. "He might have slipped through the window into the back alley or might still be here among the crowd."

"Great! The lead re-picked and heating up!" Kenzi was almost triumphant, "Tam-Tam, you do the outer perimeter search, I'll charm my way into the gents and if he's not there I'll go to work the crowd."

"You are welcome to it," the valkyrie murmured and rushed out while the kitsune ambled to the rest-room. With a dead-pan expression the girl marched into the gents and stopped in front of the row of cubicles. A young man at the urinal gave her a bowled-over look vainly attempting to handle his dick and his zipper with his eyes riveted on the impertinent beauty of a newcomer. Kenzi waved a hand in front of his nose, "What? Ever heard of restroom-hopping? It's like table-hopping only in toilets. Very much in vogue." Dismissing him as a stupefied no-threat she turned her attentions to the cubicles, only two of which were occupied. Kenzi crouched low and observed and sniffed first the one pair of shoes than the other – both of the shoe owners came up as no match to the enormous wolf-shifter.

In a light leap Kenzi scaled the high window looking out onto the back alley and tried to put her forest training with Dyson to a practical use in field conditions. Smells, sounds, night-shrouded images – all were coming to her in a trickle, then the trickle widened to a stream. After a while Kenzi landed back onto the rest-room floor and ignoring another man impressed by her appearance made her way out with a meditative look of concentration.

Once out she didn't hurry to work the crowd or find Tamsin but pounced on her leprechaun informant instead catching him neatly right at the exit. The little man visibly twitched seeing her but was not up to a running contest with a fox. With her strength whipped-up by anger and worry Kenzi grabbed him by the collar and gave him a good teeth-rattling shake.

"Tammy said _spill_! I say spill fast and everything or I'll put you on my menu as a beer-snack," the girl growled her pretty face scrunched up in a predatory grimace that immediately convinced the other fae. "I was just following orders," he stammered in his defense.

"You lied to us about spotting a wolf-shifter here, right? Whose orders? Why?" Kenzi gave him another message-reinforcement shake this time connecting him with a nearby wall.

"The Ash himself told me to tell you that, he gave me all the details, gave me your description, told me when you would show up," the leprechaun rattled off.

"The Ash?!" Kenzi was sandbagged enough to let go of his collar, which the fae wisely took as an opportunity to hoof it out, away and as far as possible. After a second to re-group the girl herself, grim and pursed-lipped, headed to the exit to bump into the incoming valkyrie.

"Nothing," Tamsin announced in no better mood than before.

"I know. We need to go find Dyson and Bo, like super urgent," Kenzi replied barely holding the lid on her anxiety, "It was all a decoy, Tams, Courtaud has never been here, the leprechaun was a plant."

"How do you know?" the blonde looked surprised and concerned at the younger girl's hardened face.

"A big blood-thirst-exuding faenimal should've stunk the place up but there was no smell of him in the gents or in the alley. Dyson has taught me well enough to trust my senses. The midget, on the other hand, was all reeking of lies," the kitsune explained not without a shade of pride but her tone turned grave again, "I am worried about our guys, Tammy, I am dreading, actually. Call Bo, I'll call Dyson."

They got into the car tapping busily on their respective cells. Dyson was incommunicado but Bo picked up on the tenth ring. Tamsin listened for a few seconds, her icy-blue orbs going arctic, and revved u the engine.

"Belt up, red and taily," she barked at the girl next to her, "Hate to say it but your instincts are spot-on. They are navel-deep in shit. Dyson went off after the psycho, Bo was delayed but is chasing them now. She sounds frantic."

"You haven't seen frantic yet," Kenzi mumbled her white-knuckled hands gripping the edges of her seat and her nails ripping the leather.


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter 7

An emotion can fuel you as much as it can deflate you. When the physical strength of opponents is equal an emotion can tip the balance in the same way as a chance occurrence or a third party interference, though, some prefer to call it fate. Dyson knew that he was weaker than the giant red wolf, he knew that his hatred and disgust couldn't override the scorching revengeful fury of the one who had spent the last centuries encircled by stone walls and robbed of everything that had made up his life. Dyson knew that the paralyzing dread coursing through his system was not going to stand him in good stead either. The dread of leaving his baby fox behind, the dread of letting the beast walk free and get Tamsin or Bo into his fae-cidal claws or whoever Courtaud might fancy for his next snack. Dyson gave himself a mental slap banishing the disturbing images from his conscious mind went on the offensive.

The two wolves tangled in a tight bone-crashing, skin-slashing ball, snarling and barking and baring their teeth before sinking them into each other's flesh. The red fur and the silver-grey fur were by then equally painted with crimson, Courtaud's left ear was hanging in a despondent rip. Dyson saw what he recognized as an opening and lunged for the other's throat but was brutally thrown away by the human-eater's feint. As soon as he picked himself off the ground he saw his opponent's ginger rear part disappearing behind a huge pile of concrete blocks loosely forming a shed-like construction. The Light fae's upright ears radared a sound of heels that could only belong to a very belligerent succubus and Dyson realized why Courtaud had suddenly chosen to beat a retreat. With the backup coming, the hot-headed light wolf didn't need another prod to give chase.

Bo stopped to catch her breath and clutched her burning shoulder, the wind brought her raspy snarls and sounds of teeth snapping. From a distance Bo saw the two predators locked in a fight, then racing each other around some concrete blocks and it occurred to her that it was actually the very first time she observed Dyson in his wolf form. The bizarre, barbarian beauty of the view gripped her but the spell disintegrated when in an eye-defying switch a muscular figure took place of the red wolf. Milking the most out of his speed advantage Courtaud grabbed the still wolfed-out Dyson by the scruff of his neck and smashed him, as if he was barely a puppy, into the rugged piece of wall, the shock of the impact momentarily knocking the shifter out.

Whether it was the smug grin that played on Courtaud's rough-hewn face or a terrible premonition that resonated somewhere deep in Bo's gut but she put on a burst of speed and was fast approaching the improvised fight arena at a near-run, but the events were rolling quicker than her shapely legs could carry her across obstacle course of the wasteland. In bloodflow-stopping horror the succubus saw the man seize a long rusty metal rod and raise it high above his head, she heard a high-pitched, almost banshee-like, scream and with a second's delay realized it was her own. Then Courtaud brought the rod down from his towering height and onto the lying animal's back once, twice, before running it right through the motionless blooded huddle at his feet. Still beaming, the man admired his handiwork and unhurriedly looked up at the female figure rapidly gaining definition and finally stopping a dozen of feet away from him.

Bo's scream changed into blue-eyed growl as she flipped out her gun, though, the murderer's high spirits never faltered as he took in his new pursuer's disheveled, panting appearance.

"We've been through this, honey," he drawled almost flirtingly, "and as the soon-to-be-dead wolf here can attest your scarecrow mini-rifle can't harm me."

"No idea where your conceit is coming from, but you would've have done much better if you had stuck to frog-eating," Bo snarled taking aim and firing her shot. Courtaud assumed a mocking expression as the bullet went right through his thigh but the mockery soon dissolved into a painful astonishment as he felt the first burn of silver in his flesh. "_Parbleu_," he muttered clutching the damaged leg and sinking to his knees. The succubus, still in her blue-eyed mode, strode over to him and grabbed his chin to lift his face to meet her electrified gaze. "Time for a well-deserved snack," she purred and pressed her lips to the quivering mouth of the red wolf. A wave of desire, engulfing and spell-binding, a dual sensation, satisfying and draining at the same time, took dominance over all of his feelings. The woman sent another of her pulses into the creature, she had captured in a kiss, and an iridescent stream of pure energy was raising to the surface and leaving his body to fill hers. Thirty seconds later Courtaud fell onto the ground, light-headed, emptied and breathing raggedly whereas Bo rushed over to the prostrate form of the wolf.

Gently she lifted the blood-dripping muzzle and shook him ever so slightly. "Come on, Dyson, wake up, turn human, you need my chi and I need you to be at least kissable," she urged, desperation rising as her fingers failed to find a pulse in the furry body. Crucial seconds were ticking away but the shifter retained his animal form and refused to spring a pulse. "Holy shit!" Bo cursed heartily and gave a resigned shrug, "Men, women, that's my chance to broaden my horizons." She bent down and opening the fanged jaws slightly pushed a sliver of life-force into the faenimal – and immediately a barely noticeable beat came alive under her finger-tips pressed to Dyson's neck. Encouraged by this sign of her treatment working she repeated the procedure – another portion of chi made the wolf give a spasmodic cough and morph into his human form.

Bo sniffled with relief and looked over the bloody mess that was his body. "Just hold on, it's not the first time you're trying to die on me, so you know the drill," she whispered getting her cell out to hit speed-dial. "Where the hell are you, blondie?" she barked with a whole different intonation once her call was answered, "I need a hand or two here, stat."

The requested hand was soon provided when the two girls burst onto the battle ground following Bo's directions. Tamsin summarized the state of play curtly, "One wolf who is fortunately only half-dead and the other who is unfortunately only half-dead." The blonde detective handcuffed Courtaud, half-conscious from blood- and chi-loss, and let off a bit of steam by giving him a heart-felt kick. Kenzi's concern at that point didn't go beyond the first of the mentioned wolves. She sat down on the ground and with uncharacteristic possessiveness pulled Dyson from Bo's hug into her own, her small hands running over his now slightly shaking body. The succubus peered into her best friend's death-mask of a face and put a consoling hand on her skinny shoulder. "He's breathing, Kenz, he'll be fine, we'll get him to Lauren," she murmured in sympathy. The kitsune jerked her chin up and glared at Bo with something approximating hostile distrust. "Fine?" she hissed wiping blood off Dyson's back to reveal something white glistening wetly in the little pool of crimson, "It's a shard of his spine, Bo. How fine is that?"

Bo recoiled slightly, transfixed as much by fear for the shifter as by her bff's accusation weaved in between her words, and got up. "I called in for a faebulance," Tamsin cut into the smog-thick atmosphere between the girls, "Lauren's on her way, they'll be here as soon as they gps their way onto the wasteland. Bo, help me drag this big lump of meat to the car. I'll hand-deliver him to the dungeons." Bo promptly joined the valkyire saying, "You take his legs, I'll take his arms" – a sensible suggestion that Tamsin, however, immediately blew off. "You take his left leg, I'll get the right one," she huffed and grabbed Courtaud' foot, "Let his French ass come into close contact with Canadian soil."

If Kenzi had been less feverishly worried for her wolf she might have enjoyed the sight of the two girls dragging the huge body across all the bumps and roughnesses of the ground but her eyes were trained solely on Dyson, her ears monitoring his uneven breathing, while her mind, thrown into turmoil, was trying to wrap itself around what had happened. "Why did you go it alone? Why didn't you use the gun?" she silently asked her lover rocking both their bodies in a gentle soothing motion.

When people came with a stretcher and Lauren's professional tones, a bit diluted by fearful worry, cut into her near-catatonic bubble, Kenzi allowed them to take Dyson from her and hoist him onto the stretcher. She followed them to the ambulance car but before getting inside suddenly doubled back, propelled by a semi-conscious hunch, to the spot where she had earlier seen the wolf's discarded gun. Kenzi picked up the weapon and tucked it under her jacket right next to her own and trotted back to the car.

The cheerful morning sunshine caught Kenzi curled in the corner of the lab opposite the patients' room. The cold floor tiles were cooling her behind rather pleasantly and the general uncomfort of her position had kept her from falling asleep throughout the night. Bo had made a brief appearance to inform her that Courtaud was safely in the dungeons awaiting the verdict of both of the Ashes concerned. Lauren had emerged out of the surgery tiredly pulling off her blood-splattered scrubs with vague assurances that Dyson would live but her eyes were shifty. Neither the one nor the other woman managed to snap Kenzi out of her strange statics that they put down to grief and worry. They would have been hugely surprised to find out that underneath her emotions there was an idea forming and reforming itself, begging to be checked and, if proved true, to be acted upon.

Later Kenzi relocated to Dyson's room to perch on a chair next to his bed. The shifter was hooked onto a set of blipping-blinking machinery with an IV attached to his hand, his face palid and expressionless, his body twitchless still – from the anesthetized state he segued right into unconscious state.

"You'd better go home, Kenzi, grab a shower, have something to eat, sleep," Lauren softly advised, "If you don't want to end up on the next bed."

"You are right, I need my strength," the girl replied evenly and her out-of-character obedient sensibility and unnatural calm alerted doctor more than a fit of hysterics might have.

Sharply Kenzi got up and turned to skewer the blonde with her piercing red-rimmed sleep-deprived eyes. "When is he gonna come round?" she asked.

"Tomorrow at the soonest," the doctor answered almost apologetically. "The injuries he sustained are grave but not fatal. He'll live and that's the most important thing," she made the mistake of adding. Kenzi pounced on her last words with a burst of aggressive vehemence, "And the less important thing is, doctor?"

Lauren felt two small hands grab her forearms and something claw-sharp pricked her skin painfully. The five-year-old humiliatingly familiar sense of her own vulnerability before the fae washed over the woman and the fact that it was induced by her former human ally saddened the blonde doctor even more. "His ribs were broken but they are mending," she started slowly, "but his spine is shattered and there is no telling as yet if he'll fully recover the use of his legs."

"You mean he can be paralyzed?" the young kitsune snarled and under the dim hospital light Lauren suddenly noticed that the girl's once raven hair were shining a distinctive red.

"He'll be walking," Lauren said evasively, "the question is how well."

Kenzi slowly unclasped her hands from around the doctor's arms and stepped back without taking her suddenly vacant stare off the blonde's face. She walked over to Dyson, kissed his forehead tenderly and without another word strode purposefully out of the room. When the door closed, Lauren let out a long-held breath and allowed a bit of panic show across her composed pale features, she carefully rolled up the sleeves of her white coat to expose the smooth skin of her fore-arms marred by ten red marks left by the kitsune's claws.

For a second Lauren debated alerting the others about Kenzi's present state of disgruntlement but her sense of what was the right thing to do clashed violently with a peculiar reluctance to do the said right thing. In the end, the doctor got down to checking her patient murmuring to herself a slightly spiteful mantra of "Let the fae deal with their own." In actual fact, Lauren had a slowly solidifying suspicion that was exactly what Kenzi was intending to do.


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter 8

Courtaud was sitting on the stone floor of his cell, the reinforced shackles on his wrists and ankles binding him to within a meter from the wall they were attached to. But for that minor inconvenience he was feeling rather comfy and optimistic – his wounds had been treated and dressed, he was incarcerated not executed and from what he had managed to overhear the local Ash was negotiating his transfer back to _La Belle France_. Most satisfyingly of all, his revenge was mostly accomplished with Dyson – his deceitful captor – either dead or dying or, at the very least, crippled for life, which served the purpose just as well – the red wolf smiled nostalgically at the memory of driving the rod through the still body. He wished he could lay his hands on the blonde bitch who had disbanded his pack in the 15th century and who he knew was somewhere in the New World as well but that would just have to wait till he gave his compatriots another slip. And he could definitely do waiting, he had learnt that well in the almost 250 years of his imprisonment – conserve his strength, look out for an opportunity which would surely present itself if he was patient.

Patient he certainly was but also bored and when his lupine ears caught a commotion through the chinks in the thick door his spirits lifted a bit in anticipation of a possible trouble brewing. Courtaud did a half-rise from his spot on the floor and strained his senses, he thought he heard a scream, a dull noise of a blow and another one of a heavy body hitting the floor, then a light sound of ballerina-like steps approaching. In a second the door swung open and on the threshold there appeared a short frail-looking figure, the hood of the anorak obscured the features but the wolf vaguely recognized the scent he had picked quite recently – something young, something fae, something wild. The hood was thrown off and Courtaud saw what he had already guessed – a young pale big-eyed face framed by thick wavy red hair with incongruous raven-black highlighting strands, a generally pretty girl's face and the wolf was about to live up to his name with a whistle or a dirty joke but something in those transparent-grey eyes dampened his enthusiasm – a lurking fury, a hatred so strong as to make her gaze singeing.

Instead f insouciantly playful he sounded cautious when he asked, "What are you? What do you want with me?" There was no immediate answer but the girl stepped into the cell and was now standing just a few feet away. Courtaud drew in another breath of smell-laden air and ameneded in surprise, "A fox? A kitsune? Who sent you and why? The Ash?"

The girl's silence was unnerving and under her unwavering stare the wolf was getting distinctly restless, he pulled at his chains and got up wincing with the pain from his wounds. It was then that his mute visitor suddenly smiled widely and broke her silence. "You are hurting, you are practically immobilized. Good!" she purred with unconcealed gloating. "I like you this way, but I'd like you dead much more," she said almost factually as she pulled a dagger from under her anorak and, without further preliminaries and lightning-fast, streaked to his side and pushed the weapon into his stomach and up behind his ribcage. The wolf staggered and fell back onto the floor looking incredulously at the silver-gleaming blood-dripping blade that the girl had swiftly retracted from his new wound.

"Why?" he whispered strangely obsessed with the reason, "Are you the Ash's assassin?"

"The Ash?" the girl giggled, "No, the Ash is all busy arranging your trip home to score some diplomatic points on the political fae-scene. And I am not an assassin, you douche-bag, I am Kenzi and Dyson is mine. You tried to take him from me, you pay."

"Dyson?" the hated name registered and Courtaud tried for contemptuous, "Dyson's dead or near to it for what he did to me."

"He's alive," the kitsune gritted through clenched sharpened teeth, "which is more that will be said about you when I am done. Revenge for revenge – I know it's not right on a deep moral level but I don't give a flying fuck!" With an enraged force she plunged the dagger again into his chest and stepped back to look into his eyes gradually filling with pain and inevitability.

"You are not even giving me a fighting chance," the wolf wheezed, "You are killing a defenseless prisoner in cold blood."

"Yes, I am," the young fox was looking on expressionless as the blood streamed down the front of his shirt pooling around him on the stone floor. "I am not after medals, I just don't want you to live. You are welcome to bleed to death, psycho." She bowed to wipe the blade on his trousers and then calmly headed for the door but halted and turned back again. "On second thought," she murmured tilting her head to the side meditatively, "I can't take any more chances. What if someone finds you too soon?"

With unhurried graceful little steps Kenzi doubled back and leaned over the prostrate wolf, "Your liver's already pierced. Seems fitting," she explained and drove the dagger into Courtaud's heart. Erring on the side of caution, she then spent an extra minute making sure he was dead before ambling out into the narrow corridor of the dudgeon, stepping over the two unconscious guards and made it calmly up the stairs.

At right about that time Bo was lying flat on the couch observing the ceiling when a knock on the door startled her out of her contemplation. "Don't pretend you don't know this door is a malfunctioning ornament," she yelled, too tired to get up or to worry. The token of a partition creaked on its hinges and a blonde head peeked inside. Tamsin walked through to the room and perched silently on the armrest of the couch next to Bo's unsocked feet.

"What are you up to, succu…bus?" the valkyrie uncharacteristically amended the second part of her usual nickname for Bo, "And where's your personal doctor Wet-blanket? Not hovering around for a change?"

"Lauren's tied up at the lab with Dyson near-death and all the commotion," Bo answered absent-mindedly propping herself up on her elbows to look at the blonde.

"Is he gonna make it?" Tamsin asked cautiously, concern for her partner evident in her eyes.

"Lauren says he is but …," the succubus said with despair creeping into her tone, "He might not be able to walk. Oh, Tamsin, I feel so guilty about letting him tackle Courtaud alone."

"You were saving the girl," the valkyrie remarked, "besides, Dyson is far from defenseless. I just wonder why he didn't shoot the scum-bag on sight."

"And Kenzi…," Bo went on sitting up and inching closer to her late guest, "She's going to take it hard, I don't even want to think about what kind of hard."

Tamsin leaned in in her turn and put a hand on the succubus's shoulder mostly left uncovered by her black spaghetti-strap tank-top, "Hey, you have to be by her side, you are her bestie and the only one who can help her go through with this ordeal," she tentatively reminded. "And look at me turning relationship counselor – me who has no relationship whatsoever," she added not to get behind with a bit of sarcasm.

"You know that this last one is not true," the brunette breathed out softly and with a warm husky quality and reverted immediate to the more pressing issue, "And I would be by Kenzi's side if I knew where this side currently is. She left the hospital in the afternoon and was heading home to catch some rest and some food, at least, that's what she told Lauren. But she never made it here and I've been calling her ever since and she isn't picking up and now I'm worried for her as well as for Dyson and my official girl-friend is seemingly shirking me without giving us a chance orf a real much-needed talk and I'm spilling my heart to an arctic snarky valkyrie," Bo whined, "Why do I feel like I'm hitting rock bottom?"

"Kenzi's gone AWOL?" Tamsin frowned prioritizing the information dumped upon her, "A baby fae, kitsune at that, is prowling alone when the love of her life's landed in hospital. I saw her worried for Dyson when they were not yet that close and she was still a human. She was a tempest back then, now she should be a calamity waiting to happen."

"It's Kenzi we're talking about," Bo countered defensively, "Human or fae she's the most noble-hearted, selfless and loyal person I've ever known. Your prowling calamity reference is off the beam, Tams."

The valkyrie didn't even have time to comment on the anxious crease in the brunette's smooth brow belying her heated words as the cell chirped on the coffee table and the succubus snatched it up immediately. The blonde waited immobile and unmoved on her perch of an arm-rest until Bo finished listening to whoever was on the other end of the line and terminated the call with a curt, "I'll get back to you if I find anything out." The cell was unceremoniously dropped on the threadbare carpet and for a while the succubus was staring more holes into its worn surface but then she looked up and her brown eyes locked with the green of the Norse fae.

"It was Hale," she said in a wooden voice, "Courtaud was killed in his holding cell in the dungeons – multiple stab wounds delivered by a silver dagger-proportioned blade – neatly fitting the description of the one reported stolen from Trick a couple of hours before. The guards were found unconscious, on recovery they claimed the Ash himself had come to see the prisoner but when they were escorting him to the cell the Ash started sort of shimmering or something and his image disintegrated to reveal a short skinny girl with huge light eyes and long red hair. The girl knocked them out cold while they were still processing the visual and took their keys."

"A baby kitsune gradually coming into her powers, I told you," Tamsin cut in but didn't sound particularly triumphant. "She is learning to create an illusion – one of main gifts of her kind – but can't as yet sustain it long enough."

"Hale said she had called him earlier from the infirmary to ask what he was going to do with Courtaud and he explained to her that he had to extradite the beast to France," Bo added picking up the dropped cell and speed-dialling mechanically the number she had already dialed dozens of time that night.

"That couldn't have gone well with a grief-crazed revenge-seeking fox," the valkyrie murmured, "She might well have taken justice into her own hands. Though I have to admit that comes as a bit of a relief. Courtaud had it in for me after our little Paris adventure. If he had escaped from the Frenchies again I could have been the next one on his hit list."

"Really?!" the succubus chucked the unresponsive cell again and rounded on the blonde with a vehemence, "Kenzi killed a prisoner of the Light Ash and you are relieved? She has never killed in cold blood before. And she didn't even talk to me or to Trick first."

"Maybe cause she has stopped feeling the weakest of the gang, the runt of the litter, so to say," Tamsin provided an insight into Kenzi's actions, "She feels strong now, she feels like she's protecting Dyson when he can't do it himself."

"Feeling strong is dangerous, trust me," Bo's tone dropped sullenly, "It's a fine line between strong and unrestrainable. We need to find her pronto. Are you with me, blondie?"

"It's the first time in weeks I've caught you somewhere warm and comfy and without the grumbly-whiny-clingy doctor and all I get is a hunt for Kenzi gone off her trolley," the valkyrie grunted.

"Come on, who's grumbly here? I'll make it up to you, promise," Bo drawled more than a little playfully, "That is as soon as my very best bff is straightened out, Dyson is out of his death-bed, I've talked with Lauren and we're all fine and unbothered."

"Which is next to never," Tamsin sighed and went on more harshly, "And what are you gonna do when you find her? Deliver her to the Ash to stand trial for defying his orders? Put her into therapy? Talk her down, tie her up and keep her in the basement till she cools her jets?"

"Whatever works best for her. And I don't think Hale will put her on trial," Bo remarked meditatively, "He is in love with her, has been for a long time. He'll find a way to protect her."

Tamsin suddenly halted mid-rise from the couch and flopped back heavily. "Wait a sec. When we were all hunting the red wolf Kenzi got a call from the Ash, he told her to go to a bar where Courtaud had supposedly been seen. We came, got a witness but Kenzi smelled a rat with her enhanced foxy sniffer – the witness turned out a plant, the tip was a decoy. Why does it sound to me like the love-struck Ash was trying to shield his love interest from a highly risky ass-on-the-line task?"

Bo's expressive face showed disbelief validly fighting against the crashing logic of Tamsin's reasoning. "Hale?! No, he couldn't have," the succubus stated trying for firm.

"Oh, really? Cause the Ashes are traditionally known for their kind hearts, the purest of motives and transparent non-manipulative ways," the blonde mocked.

"No, but because by doing that he would have endangered his friends and the mission itself and Kenzi would've never forgiven him and …," Bo stopped mid-sentence her breath hitching, "Holy shit! If we admitted for a second that that was true, Hale would be a fool with a target on his back." She tugged the blonde by her arm none too gently this time, "Get a move on, Tammy. We're going to his Ash-ness."

"What? The Kenzi search is called off?" the valkyrie huffed but followed eagerly.

"No, that's where Kenzi's gonna be if your twisted logic is sound," Bo was already half-way to the door, "And if your logic is lame we have nothing to worry about and are just out for a social call."


	9. Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Hale replaced the receiver on the old-fashioned hefty rotary phone – the legacy of the previous Ash. The call to Bo threw no light upon Kenzi's whereabouts and did nothing to alleviate his multi-angled worry – Courtaud was dead and to be explained away to his French counterpart, Dyson was critical and the siren felt reluctant to try open the wormy can of his mixed emotions on this score, the girl he loved was missing after having acted bat-shit crazy. If that really was her, the young Ash thought and clung to that idea with a last-straw vigour. It really would not be the first case of mistaken identities in the fae world.

Slightly comforted by that line of reasoning Hale was about to put through another call when he heard the door behind him creak open and turned sharply. There she was right in front of him – the girl everyone was after – in a dark stained anorak, her hair disheveled, red shining through her customary raven, her pale face set but her eyes restless.

"Hello, you're A-shity," she singsonged to him stepping forward and his hand jerked instinctively towards the side of his desk. "Don't!" the girl warned with a sweetly sincere smile, "Whatever alarm button you have there, you won't have time to press it, I'm like super-speedy, I'm faster than Dyson. Or rather than Dyson used to be." Hale carefully withdrew his hand and as if to prove the wisdom of his obedience Kenzi streaked across the room at a speed defying the siren's eye. She stopped on the other side of the massive desk and ensconced herself into the majestic plush-padded arm-chair. "Comfy," she giggled giving it a light bounce, "Made specially for very special asses … or Ashes. You see the pun here, right?" Her giggling unnerved Hale even more than her initial threat and he spoke up in his best grave tones, "How did you get in here, Kenzi?"

"I walked," the girl answered simply, "Well, not all the way. I first climbed over the compound wall and from there I walked as there was nobody around willing to carry me."

"But how did you manage to bypass my security?" the Ash demanded with a sinking feeling of the fruits of his previous self-persuasions being blown away.

Kenzi suddenly looked abashed like a child caught with a hand in a cookie jar. "I pretended to be doctor Lewis but my illusion soon shattered – it's a new thing for me, you know, I still need practicing." Her face lit up with excitement again when she went on, "Then I just got the drop on the rest of them, the element of surprise, you know. Dyson would be proud."

"I doubt it," Hale chastised her, "He'd be worried and disappointed by your attacking the Light Ash compound."

"Well, technically, you are not my Ash, I haven't yet picked a side," the girl reminded softly but there was a glint in her eye that the siren might not have liked it he had caught it. "And besides, I never attacked, I just came to visit you. Am I not welcome?"

Hale let her last words go unanswered and kept interrogating while she seemed to be in the talkative mood, "Did _you_ kill Courtaud?"

"Sure," the girl replied as if surprised by the blatant stupidity of the question, "Because _you_ didn't."

"How could I possibly, Kenz?" Hale stepped closer to her lounging form, "I am the Ash, I do justice, not revenge, devastated as I might be over what happened to Dyson, there is law to uphold. Dyson would have told you the same."

"But he can't and that's the point," Kenzi swiftly jumped up from the luxurious arm-chair. "He can't tell me anything, he can't move and nobody knows if he ever will. And you were about to let the person responsible for that walk."

"No, I were not," Hale spoke heatedly, "I would've demanded his execution and the beast would've paid for all the lives he took with his own. And now I have a lynching case on my hands and you are in the crosshairs."

"What happens now?" Kenzi seemed suddenly deflated, her voice going small and hesitant.

"I don't know, Kenz," the siren was truly desperate, "I am duty bound to arrest you for a willful murder, but how can I?" He crossed the little space that there was between them and put his hands on her now-slouching shoulders, the deep brown eyes meeting the misty grey.

"Will you protect me?" she whispered with a touching astonishment, "After all I've done?"

"I will," Hale answered without a second's hesitation, "I will do anything … for you."

Kenzi gave a sudden shiver under the weight of his hands on her shoulders and made a mini-step closer looking up into his face. "You have a lot to protect me from, Hale, first of all, from myself. I'm breaking down, I don't know what I am any more. My hair…" She held up a lock twisting it between her fingers. "It goes redder and redder, my nails are sharpening and my teeth are scratching my tongue if I'm not careful. Since Dyson's down, it's accelerating, I'm spiraling down."

She was becoming increasingly frantic, her small body trembling, her restless hands fumbling nervously with her sleeves, than with Hale's waistcoat buttons. "Dyson was keeping me together but now I'm losing it, I'm losing my Kenzi-ness. All these powers that are coming forth – I don't even now what they are or how to control them, that is what Bo must have felt long ago."

"Bo was alone and you've got us," Hale cooed softly his mind half-distracted by her hand touching him, "You've got me, I'll always be in your corner, I'll protect you. I'll hush up this matter with Courtaud, we'll work your kitsune out. You'll pick the Light and I'll be your personal guardian Ash, Kenzi."

Kenzi was now fully in his embrace, her arms looped around him, her forehead first pressing into his shoulder, then she tiptoed to sniff at his neck and nuzzle it with a guttural exhale.

"I know you've always been caring for me," she purred looking Hale in the face, "You saved me from Courtaud when you brought Tams and me to that nice little club. It could be me on that hospital bed now."

The siren was drowning in the misty silver of her enormous eyes, he could read gratefulness and admiration and affection in them. "Yes, I did," he muttered half-dazed, "I couldn't risk losing you."

The girl's hand rose to caress the side of his face, to run a finger around the contours of his lips. "Losing me to the maniac or to Dyson?" she gave a gentle laugh and Hale, his ear as differentiating as his vocal cords were masterful, heard happiness and warmth in its pealing sound.

"To both of them," the young siren let his hands drop down Kenzi's slim figure encircling her waist, pulling her closer, their lips were practically touching when he breathed out, "I love you, I have loved you since forever, I loved you when Dyson was still chasing after Bo with his tongue lolling out. And I will always love you."

The girl imperceptibly tensed in his arms and suddenly her hands pressed into his chest pushing him away with unsuspected strength. "Why didn't you tell me earlier?" she was boring into him with a burning glare, "Because I was human?"

"Because I was a fool," Hale confessed painfully and saw an understanding acceptance in the girl's expression. He reclaimed his hold on her waist and bowed down to her lips. "Is it easier or more difficult to complete with an unconscious crippled man?" she breathed into his mouth and the siren gave a jolt breaking away from a kiss that never happened.

As if an invisible director commanded _Cut,_ Kenzi's whole demeanour changed – gone were the warm affection in her expression and the tender touches of her hands, her tone turned openly mocking and her eyes were glinting with disdain, mischief and anger. "You don't know what to answer? You should have thought about that before you hooked Dyson up with this dummy," she went on, producing a gun from her anorak. "The silver bullets that were supposed to kill the beast, to protect us all, were not silver, not in the gun that you personally handed to Dyson."

"It is a mistake," Hale croaked, his throat suddenly going very dry.

"What is?" the girl gritted her fury showing, "That Dyson managed to survive? Or that I found his gun and checked it? I couldn't believe it first – the leprechaun who decoyed us on your orders, the useless gun, but after your confession everything clicked into place."

"Are you accusing me of setting up my best friend to poach his girl-friend away?" the siren finally found his voice trying to fill it with proper indignation. "Listen to yourself, Kenzi!"

"Stupid, right?" Kenzi gave a contemptuous snort, "Stupid of you to think for a second that I can love you, that I can give up Dy for you." She circled her face with her finger in the air. "That I-am-falling-for-you-my-hero cute little mien was the most difficult illusion for me to sustain," she openly sneered, looking at the astounded man.

"Look me in the eye and tell me that it wasn't you, that you didn't know about the blank bullets," Kenzi's piercing eyes drilled into Hale, her nostrils flared, "Just remember that I can sniff your lie, like literally."

"I think I probably preferred you a powerless human, Lil Momma," the siren replied and that was answer enough for the kitsune. She leaped forward and hit him in the stomach with as much force as her fae fist could carry. Winded, Hale dropped to his knees clutching his tender ribs.

"Ok, maybe I deserve this," he gritted out, "but so does Dyson." That remark cost him a smack in the face but spitting out the blood Hale went on stubbornly, his own rage coming to the boil. "Did he think about my feelings when he took you away? No, he never gave me any consideration – a spoilt aristocratic boy, a mere sidekick to be looked down by the stoic wolf-warrior who feels free to play around – first Bo, then Ciara, then my sister who he fucked meaninglessly in my father's own cellar, then you. Why couldn't he leave you alone? I told him once how I felt about you back in the day when we were still buddies sharing a drink. He chose to forget it, to ignore it."

For a split second his passionate tone, his pain and desperate sincerity seemed to penetrate the blinding veil of the kitsune's frenzy, her face softened, her lips curled down as if succumbing to tears. "Yeah, Dy can be an insensitive klutz," the girl softly agreed, "But he never looked down on you and he risked his life for you and he never took me away from you because you never tried to make me yours. Deep down you are a spoilt aristocratic boy! And now you are becoming a true Ash, Hale, ruthless, manipulative, purpose-oriented."

"And you are becoming a crazy foxy bitch no better than Inari," the siren cried out, insulted into action, and drew in a deep breath. Whatever song he was going to assault Kenzi's ears with was not to break forth as the girl's clawed fingers grabbed and squeezed Hale's neck, shutting off his airway and bruising his larynx heavily. The man was flailing, trying to push her away but his weakening, oxygen-deprived body was no match for the enraged kitsune's adrenaline-pumped strength. His vision started to turn from grey to red-dotted black when she suddenly released him and tossed him away like a worn-out earless teddy. Hale hit the floor face-down taking in ragged greedy breathes, as soon as his sight regained its grasp on the surroundings he extended an arm in an attempt to clutch the gun previously discarded by Kenzi but his hand was immediately crushed under the heel of a boot. The siren yelped silently from the pain and got a reprieve when the boot was lifted.

Hale flipped over onto his back and looked up at his attacker wearily, tired resignation in his expression more eloquent than any words that he could get out through his mangled throat. Kenzi was standing above him, the fury slowly dying out of her eyes replaced by a sad contempt. "No, I am not going to kill you, Hale," she shook her head, "Whether you are a good person who did a very bad thing or a bad person who has done lots of very good things, I just can't. You haven't got Dyson killed after all."

A tight smile spread her lips and a set of sharp little kitsune teeth showed through, "But from now on you should pray for the wolf's health …" Kenzi didn't have to elaborate further and didn't actually have the time for that as the door burst open and two very ruffled girls made it in at a run.

Bo sprinted towards her best friend and clutched her into a hug as much protective as it was restrictive. "Kenzi, are you all right? What have you done?" she asked anxiously taking in the situation. Tamsin in the meantime checked on Hale perfunctorily and picked up the gun from the floor.

"It's Dyson," Kenzi growled from between Bo's encircling hands, "Check the bullets and do the maths, blondie."

"They are ordinary ones, not silver," the valkyrie reported in surprise having done what she was told to. She exchange a eureka look with Bo and bent down over Hale, still on the floor and still clasping his hand around his neck. "You piece of Light upper-crust shit, you set my partner up!" she growled positively disinclined to small-talk. The siren, however, was already beyond feeling threatened and merely raised a shoulder in a mute yeah-that's-me gesture. Tamsin's face was quickly storm-clouding but the succubus, torn between the conflicting emotions and interests of people she cherished, not equally but all the same, stepped in positioning herself in front of Hale.

"Tamsin, down, you wish to beat up on a higher-up, go find the Morrigan," the brunette assumed a commanding tone naturally, "Kenzi, you've let off plenty of steam tonight. Now your top priority is still in hospital and he needs you badly – not arrested for an Ash-murder but washed, fed and fragrant at his bed to see first thing when he opens his eyes. Ladies, we are leaving!" She forcefully pushed the blonde towards the door and grasped Kenzi's hand to drag her in the same direction. At the door the succubus turned round and looked at the siren with her deep brown eyes filled with sorrow and frustration, "I'll tell Lauren to come see you asap, Hale. And I hope you'll come up with a good story of how, say, Courtaud got free, attacked you, attacked the guards and had to be killed or something. I don't care about the details, just make the story stick for the sake of us all. Just bare in mind that there are two powerful pissed women gunning after you, actually, make it three."


	10. Chapter 10

Chapter 10

Lauren made it across the threshold on legs shaking from utter exhaustion. Her two fae patients had taken most of her night as well as her strength and general enthusiasm for practicing her life-saving profession. At that particular moment the blonde doctor would gladly sell a bunch of a car-crash casualties for a quick shower and a bed. On second thought, these long-dreamed-of attributes of home could be foregone in favour of any horizontal surface long and wide enough for sleeping purposes. But her first logical choice turned out to be already taken by a small form emitting soft snoring-whining noises from under a blanket. Kenzi was sprawled on the sofa in Bo's living-room and Lauren had to prop herself against the armrest to let the image register in her tired mind. A barely audible creaking of the stairs alerted the woman to another presence and when a warm arm slid around the blonde, she gratefully shifted her weight onto the succubus. "She's just gone to sleep, Lauren," Bo whispered into the blonde hair, "She was agitated and worn-out at the same time but the exhaustion finally won out."

"Tell me about it," the doctor whispered back, not without an envious note.

"Let me get you upstairs," the succubus read her tone correctly, "You're barely standing up."

"I operated on a near-fatally wounded friend, had to face a mightily pissed kitsune with poor control of her temper and her talons and topped my night off with patching up a beaten-up Ash, also not in the best of moods."

"The only way I know of making you feel better is probably not an appropriate idea given your physical state," Bo murmured sympathetically, "So, I'll just restrain myself to merely tucking you in."

Which she gladly got down to after she walked her human lover upstairs and into their bedroom. Lauren didn't even fully register a pair of very well-practiced hands stripping her of her clothes and only fluttered her eyelashes open seconds before sinking into a deep sleep. "They are both dangerous," she was barely coherent with drowsiness. "Kenzi is wild and Hale is festering."

"It'll be ok, baby. As soon as Dyson is awake, Kenzi will rein in her wild impulses and Hale's been taught a good enough lesson tonight," Bo said soothingly, but Lauren was already beyond the point of deflating this optimistic view of things and the brunette settled next to her for some much deserved, though unaccustomedly action-lacking, rest.

The doctor's psycho evaluation, however, merited closer attention. While the two women were sleeping it off, the festering one and the wild one were far from restful. Hale, freshly swabbed and bandaged, was busily pulling all the strings he could think of. A call to the Morrigan with a back-scratching trade-off offer, a quick visit to one of the Ash's secret storerooms for a thing he intended to put to a good use if push came to shove and the plan of revenge was set into motion.

Kenzi, in the meanwhile, after a few hours of recharging on the sofa got up filled with a gnawing worry that immediately propelled her through the routine of grabbing a shower and something that could pass for an early-hours breakfast and setting off for the compound again. This time her sole focus was back on the wolf. The kitsune sneaked past a snoozing male nurse and into the room where she positioned herself by Dyson's bed and took his hand into hers as gently as if she could inadvertently break it. In response to her touch the man's fingers twitched and his nostrils flared instinctively drawing in her scent.

"Kenzi, are you alright?" he got out his voice painfully laborious and muffled. "I'm fine!" Kenzi exclaimed impulsively squeezing his hand. "Did we get him?" Dyson voiced the worry preying on his half-conscious mind and the girl didn't need elaboration to know who he was talking about. "He's dead," she answered in an emotionless tone fully reflecting her present attitude to this fact.

"Good!" the wolf managed a semblance of a nod and Kenzi looked down to see red imprints on his skin left by her nails. Appalled, she unclasped her fingers and whispered apologetically, "Sorry, Dy, I'm hurting your hand." But Dyson seemed too swamped by a different pain to pay any attention to the scratches, "My hand? Unless you're filing my legs with a blunt saw you have nothing to be sorry for."

When the proper morning was well on its way, Bo, flustered and gasping after a sprint she had taken, burst into the patients' room and she was greeted by the sight of Kenzi perched on the side of the hospital bed, her eyes fastened on Dyson's face and her hand to her mouth while her sharp teeth were working nervously on a piece of gold chain. Bo found the mannerism disconcertingly familiar bur refrained from rooting around in her memory for its origin. At the moment the succubus couldn't care less about it or about where the kitsune had picked up the item of jewelry but she was extremely preoccupied by her friend's obvious anxiety and pain as much as she had been frantic to find the sofa empty before that.

"You should've warned me you were leaving, Kenzi," Bo said briskly, approaching the bed cautiously. "I was worried, you know."

"Sh-sh!" the younger fae half-turned and for a second stopped her chomping to put a finger to her lips for extra emphasis, "He was awake and he said his legs were hurting. Which means he can feel them, Bo, he'll be walking again, right? And he said he loves me and then he was out of it again. Where's Lauren? Why isn't she here? Dyson may need her any minute." Her tone, happy first, quickly turned fretful and Bo flinched as the word "wild" supplied by her lover crossed her mind coupled with "unbalanced".

"Lauren was knackered and she went home for a bit of sleep, she'll be back any moment," the brunette explained evenly, trying not to reveal the inner turmoil taking hold of her. In her present state Kenzi seemed equally dangerous in the infirmary and out of it. As much as Bo wanted to keep the mentally unstable kitsune off the streets she didn't trust her around Lauren either.

As if to compound her preoccupation Kenzi sprang to her feet and started to pace the length of Dyson's bed, her steps noiseless but jerky. "It's taking him so long to recuperate," she motioned to the wolf, "And he's in so much pain. Maybe another doctor should be brought in, a fae one. Or Trick might know a magic cure, maybe he can just write it in his books for Dy to be healthy again."

Bo heaved a deep sigh and moved over to the girl putting her hands onto her shoulder to keep her in place and looked her in the face. "You know as well as I do that Trick can't use his powers without dreadful repercussions. And you know that Lauren is a wonderful doctor, the best, and you have to calm down and trust her. Give it some time, just be here for Dyson," she admonished and, before the frenzied objection that she already saw taking form in the pale grey eyes of her bestie could burst out, the succubus pressed her lips to the girl's and took a deep draw. A stream of kitsune chi hit her with a delicious thrumming quality and a tingling wave spread through Bo's body, closing the small scraps that Kenzi's sharpened nails were leaving in her skin at the same time. The succubus interrupted the feed when she judged she had taken enough and helped the girl onto her spot on the edge of the hospital bed.

"I'm so sorry, Kenzi," Bo pronounced her voice quivering with sincerity and regret, "But I had to chi-suck you into some kind of submission. You wouldn't have calmed otherwise." Initial hurtful disbelief on the younger girl's face was unexpectedly supplanted by a sudden understanding. Kenzi leaned into the footboard putting her hand on Dyson's leg as if looking for a lifeline. "I'm flying off the rails, Bo," she smiled thinly, "And you figured the weaker Kenzi is, the slower the marble-losing process."

"Dyson will set you right, as soon as he can," the succubus nodded, "Until then just stay here by his side and we'll hope you don't have enough energy left to attack anyone or go around looking for trouble or causing it."

Bo went out of the compound far from soothed but temporarily satisfied with her stop-gap measure and at the exit door ran into Lauren rushing in to check on her lupine patient.

"Kenzi is here, Lauren," Bo warned the blonde and saw her face tense at the news, "Relax, I've defused her for the time being. She's running low on chi – I had to kiss her out of it – and is relatively harmless. But promise to call me as soon as you see her recharged enough to give trouble." The doctor didn't bother masking her relief despite the fleeting stomach-clenching sensation at the thought of her lover kissing the kitsune. After the door swung shut behind the succubus Lauren turned and bumped straight into a fae male nurse who she had left in charge in the last responsible move she was capable of the previous night.

"He's stable, doctor Lewis," the nurse dutifully reported and at Lauren's non-verbal urging continued, "His girl-friend showed up in the wee hours and then Bo the unaligned succubus joined her but has already left."

"And you?" the blonde enquired about the nurse's phone-in-hand ready-to-scoot-out position.

"I am just taking a minute's breather to call my wife, doctor Lewis," came the respectful answer. Content with her inquiries, Lauren went over to Dyson's room while the nurse resumed his way out. Once in the open air the he put through the announced call but, strangely enough, neither his tone nor the employed form of address corroborated the version he had presented to his human superior. He delivered practically the same report to someone he was calling "sir", though his voice upgraded from respectful to overtly obsequious and he added the salient fact of having overheard what Bo had told the doctor about weakening Kenzi. On the other end of the line Hale put down the receiver and turned to two huge men waiting for his orders. "It all comes together even better than I hoped. The coast is clear, gentlemen, the kitsune is in the infirmary, temporarily at a disadvantage."

"Shall we bring her into the dungeon, sir?" one of the men asked.

"As the events of the last night served to show, the dungeon is not exactly the most suitable place to hold the rabid fox," the Ash frowned at the memory of what he could only term as his double disgrace brought about by the women who were supposed to look up to him as their ruler. "No, not the dungeon. I've got a very special chamber prepared for her instead and a very special neighbour."

Tamsin braced herself against the headboard and winced as the pain lanced through her temples. "I should really cut down on booze," she murmured, "getting old." But another deep, system-cleansing intake of air brought on more clarity and the valkyrie looked around with a frown. The room she found herself in contained two beds, a nightstand and a moderately-sized wardrobe. A side door was opening into what looked like a tiny bathroom. The ensemble didn't look like a motel room or a chance night acquaintance's room, at least, much less did it resemble the interior of the flat Tamsin had been the not proud occupant of for the last couple of months.

The blonde sniffed herself, looked over the sheets, got up and made a round of the room. She tried the handle of the door and, on finding it locked, tried her shoulder against it but the wood wouldn't give an inch. The valkyrie returned to the bed and plopped back down resolved not to expend her energy unnecessarily until she adjusted her goals with more accuracy.

"I haven't changed out of my Hale-kicking Kenzi-retrieving clothes, no sane one-night-stand amateur would fall for the amount of BO I am sporting and a perv would leave stains on the sheets. The room is warded by a spell," she resumed her findings. "And my head is pounding like someone spiked the last beer I remember gulping down with a valkyrie knock-out poison. Neat! And I am trapped."


	11. Chapter 11

Chapter 11

Lauren performed her checks and made the required notes on her clipboard under Kenzi's glaring gaze and the doctor felt extremely grateful to Bo for taking the sting out of the new fae's restless agitation. "The only reason I am not asking Bo to throw you out is that you seem to have a positive influence on Dyson's state," she warned in a low voice restraining herself from voicing her primary reason for that: "And he's your only anchor to sanity."

The kitsune was just about to come up with a worthy reply when her fox ears caught an incongruously rude sound, menacing and out of place at the infirmary. "Two men are here, Doc," she pronounced in a peculiar high-pitch growl, "and they are not coming to party, they've got weapon. Lauren looked over at the girl just in time to catch a pointy-toothed unhappy half-smile. For a second the doctor weighed the possibility of it being a trick of the new Kenzi but then the sound of approaching heavy boots became evident even to her unenhanced human ears and she straightened her white coat and pasted on her authoritative face. The door swung open sharply and Kenzi crouched next to Dyson in a defensive position while Lauren stepped forward determined to impress her commanding status on the newcomers straightaway.

The two huge fae striding confidently into the lab, however, seemed pretty hard to impress. One of them spoke up before the doctor had a chance to enquire after the purpose of their visit. "We've come on the orders on the Ash," he boomed casting a disparaging look at the tiny figure huddled next to a listless form of the wolf, "which are to apprehend one kitsune charged with murder, attempted assasintaion and civil disobedience."

Whereas Lauren gasped with horror, Kenzi was relieved to be the focus of the Ash's missionaries thus deflecting them from Dyson. She straightened proudly and slid off the side of the bed, but had to brace herself against the footboard as her legs were still shaking from Bo-induced exhaustion. "That would be me," she piped up almost sweetly.

"Will you go willingly?" the fae asked casually and looked almost bored in a what's-the-fun-in-a-sitting-duck kind of way. The kitsune did a flash-quick calculation factoring in her severely diminished strength against two full-blooded fae, a chance to stick it to them all against a chance of Dyson or Lauren getting hurt in the process. As if to facilitate her thinking the other fae, silent till then, ambled with a speed unusual for someone of his bulk towards the bed and faced the young fox across the white expanse of the sheets covering Dyson. His hand stretched to touch the IV bag with a disinterested air. "The Ash said to use any leverage if you put up a struggle," he remarked casually, "One animal to another, come with us quietly, girl."

Kenzi sniffed the air and her eyebrows shot up, "A cougar shifter?"

"Two cougars, actually," the first fae corrected her with a distinct note of self-importance, "against a tired little fox and a half-dead wolf."

Kenzi drew another lungful of air and with a pointed tilt of her head amended, "Yeah, definitely, two cougars, both in dire need of a shower and someone to teach them about deodorant."

Snapping out of her own stupor, Lauren hurried over to the second fae and tried to insert herself between him and the IV stand. "Ash's orders or not, I'd appreciate it if you leave my patient alone in _my_ infirmary," she found her voice but got the response of being disdainfully shouldered away and shoved into the wall.

"Because one day you might find yourselves in this very bed and under this very doctor's care," the kitsune hissed in support from her spot, "Leave the doctor and the sick one alone, I'm coming with you." For a second her fingers lingered on Dyson's leg as if trying to convey her parting message of love. "Get well, my love," she whispered, "I'll come back or else you'll have to come for me. You know the drill."

Kenzi unpeeled herself from the footboard and took a step towards the first of the fae, who seized her arms in an iron hold and whirled her around handcuffing her wrists behind her back.

"No tricks, fox," he grumbled into her ear and frog-marched her to the door. Right before the threshold she managed to dig her considerable heels into the linoleum on the floor and half-turned to get the last eyeful of her wolf. Taking in the pale, hand-wringing sight of Lauren, she almost begged, "Take care of him, Lolo." Her tone immediate swung into an openly mocking range when she tacked on, "And my congrats to Bo, how clever of her to drain me for our Ash-holeness's convenience all the while keeping her caring-best-friend face on."

"It's all a mistake," Lauren cried out pleading, "I swear Bo has nothing to do with this, Kenzi, you're not thinking straight. Shake it off before you lose it completely. Bo will get you out and I will take care of Dyson. Just don't give in to your anger."

"My anger? Seems like that's all I've got," the girl spat out as the two cougar fae pushed her put of the lab and Lauren felt her knuckles crackle under her own nervous pressure. She unclasped her whitened hands and rushed to the monitor above Dyson's head. Her one hand, the one where circulation had resumed faster, slipped into her pocket and fumbled for her cell.

At that very moment Bo was standing in the middle of a rather littered and very unfeminine-looking room belonging to the most feminine valkyrie in town. The room bore all the signs of not having being disturbed by a cleaning hand for a good couple of weeks and of not being disturbed in any other way over the last couple of days. "Where are you, Tammy?" the succubus whispered in a question to herself taking her own cell out to put in another unanswered and thus uninformative call to the said blonde. But the vibrating buzz of the incoming call from another blonde stalled her. "Lauren?" she spoke into the phone and frowned, listening to the doctor's flustered and stammering rendition of the most recent developments. "So, Kenzi's taken, Tamsin is missing and Hale seems to have failed to learn his lesson," she summed up curtly, "I am on it, babe, look after our shifter." She replaced the phone into its hidey-hole in her cleavage allowed by the generous swell of her breast and stomped decisively out of the valkyrie pad.

Her step maintained its resolute and firm quality as she was making her way along the corridors of the Light fae compound, waylaid a couple of times by the guards. Those who were too persistent in asking her questions found themselves succubus-handled which provided for a bit of an additional boost to Bo's outrage-fuelled intent. The only warning Hale got of her approach was the door flying off its hinges as the brunette power-walked into his room.

"Bo?! What an unexpected pleasure to see you," the Ash exclaimed smoothly and the succubus was a little disconcerted by his apparent lack of fear but plowed ahead. She covered the short distance between them in a few broad strides and grabbed the lapels of his coat getting as close up and personal as she deemed menacing enough. "Where are they, my girls?" the succubus enunciated, her eyes swirling with blue. Hale couldn't help a nervous twitch and despite all the precautions he had taken and the safety net he had put in place felt distinctly uncomfortable under her burning gaze. "Which girls are you talking about? You have so many," he managed out in a sufficiently jeering tone.

"Your goons took Kenzi from the lab, they threatened Lauren and Dyson. Tamsin has disappeared and I have a feeling you're in the know on her whereabouts," the brunette hissed relocating one of her hands onto the siren's still tender neck. "Care to share? I'm not in a joking mood."

"Kenzi is arrested and charged as she's due to be for what she did. Tamsin has a score to settle with her own superior – the Morrigan. Both of them are contained in a guarded facility, at least, I was kind enough to let them enjoy each other's company for a while," Hale elaborated with a crooked smile.

"I warned you, didn't I?" there was not a trace of brown in Bo's eyes as she put her mouth inches away from that taunting smile.

"You are not in a position to threaten me, succubus," Hale wheezed out, his throat constricted but his confidence undiminished. "Your friends are in my power and depend on my lenience as new-born kittens depend on their mother."

"Tamsin and Kenzi are not new-born kittens, their claws can cut much deeper," Bo was nearing the end of her patience, "and such kind of leverage is a double-edged weapon. Your life at the moment depends on my lenience as one shitty underqualified and overconfident ash might depend on one really pissed succubus who is holding him by the throat." She leaned in for a lethal kiss but instead of the anticipated juicy stream of siren chi got a rasping whiff of grey that made her cough and take a step back releasing the Ash. Hale could no longer conceal his jubilation.

"Someone has overplayed her hand here," he sneered enjoying the woman's confusion, "remember the koushang – the amulet that was supposed to protect you from your crazy mother once. Now it's protecting me from the crazy daughter. You are powerless, Bo. I can knock you out with my song faster than you can bend down to get a blade from your boot. I can then call my guards and let you enjoy the Ash's hospitality in the dungeon. And I can then deliver Tamsin to the Morrigan and execute Kenzi for her crimes. If you don't want all of this to happen, you'll be a good girl and leave, never to come uninvited again."

"What will happen to the girls if I do that?" Bo asked still reeling from being thus blindsided.

"I might tell the Morrigan that her rebellious valkyrie has managed to escape and I might let the charges against the kitsune drop on the grounds of her obvious mental incompetence," Hale drawled, "It goes without saying that, in actual fact, the girls will be my guests in their current abode for as long as I think fit."

"Why did you capture them? What do you want from them?" the succubus made herself look her former friend in the eye.

"I don't care about Tamsin but she's my bargaining chip with you. As long as I have her, you can be kept in check. As for Kenzi …. Are you asking what I want from the girl I have loved with all my heart, from the one who repulsed my feelings and wanted to kill me? I don't really know, Bo. I want her either to come to her senses when the fog of her kitsune transformation clears and see what's best for her and who's best fro her or … the least I can do is make sure she won't be Dyson's. It would be debasing to extract revenge on the wolf in his current state but keeping Kenzi away from him will be killing two birds with one stone."

"Yeah, cos you will be killing them both by keeping them apart," the brunette said bitterly, "If there's one in urgent need of coming to their senses, it's you, Hale."

The siren's face closed up, his smile fading together with any other trace of emotion. "You may go, succubus, and remember what I told you," his voice was similar to the two previous ashes that Bo had butted heads with, in its supercilious tone if not in its booming quality.

Kenzi was shoved through the door by one of the cougar shifters so heartily that she actually covered half of the room before landing hard on her nose on the rough short-piled carpet.

"Look who's here," came a taunting, oddly familiar, voice from somewhere above her right shoulder, "And here was me thinking that solitary confinement is the worst that can happen to a reasonably gregarious girl."

"Tammy," the younger girl muttered her recognition, lifting herself on trembling arms and flopping over onto her butt. The valkyrie's snark dissipated as soon as she saw the kitsune's exhausted pale face and asked with a hint of concern, "Why are you here and what have they done to you, red-tail? You look like you've just completed digging the Eurotunnel. And I thought you were souped-up with fox powers."

"I was, before the blonde-magnet of a succubus hovered me clean of energy," Kenzi huffed begrudgingly accepting the valkyrie's helping hand to get her off the floor and sit her onto the side of the nearest bed, "And what I did to get a roomie like you was to royally piss off one blue-balled Ash."

"The Ash?" Tamsin allowed some degree of surprise to show on her unlined face, "You mean he arranged for us being cooped up here? The last I remember was a shoddy bar and a foaming tankard I downed before blacking out."

"Did you notice an ugly foul-smelling feline mug hovering anywhere in the vicinity of your beer?" the kistune inquired. "We were both roofied and faenapped, girl."

"Hale wants revenge for his spurned love and his humiliation," the blonde mused aloud, "You're not exactly his tea buddy at the moment. But why go to such length to take me? As a hostage against Bo?"

"And Bo loves you so much that she agreed to facilitate my taking as well?" the kitsune came to the front of Kenzi's mind overtaking the human rationale.

Tamsin gave her a sharp once-over. "I almost forgot you're off your trolley," she shrugged her shoulders dismissively, "It'll pass once you're settled into your new fae-hood. Just try to keep from killing or alienating everyone you hold dear before that happens. Bo would never hurt you, silly fox, even if I was hanging over a vat of boiling oil on a disintegrating rope she would rush off to save you."

The valkyrie's strange choice of imagery doused the kitsune's misplaced anger better than any reasonable words could. Another train of thought ousted Bo-centred conflicting emotions and Kenzi's face scrunched into a pain-filled grimace, "Dyson needs me, Tams, I have to get out of here. As soon as my strength is back, we need to act, break the door, shred the cougars or whoever is guarding us."

"You think if that was an option I would be still sitting on my delectable ass in this cage?" the blonde sniffed and pointed to the door. "This and also the walls are under a spell, you can't break the door and just prance out. I'm not even sure our fae powers are in working order in here. Hale is a scumbag, but not a stupid scumbag."

Kenzi fell back onto the bed, "Then I'm gonna rest until I think of a way out. There's always magic to beat magic. In this case, the magic of Kenzi's inventiveness."

"Hey, that's my bed," Tamsin yelled indignantly, suddenly registering the fact of the intrusion into her chosen sleeping place, "I was here first, I call dibs on it."

"Unless you fancy carrying me across the room to the other one, you can carry your own ass over there," the younger girl didn't deign to lift her drooping eyelids, "Cos there's no way I am walking or sharing a bed with you for that matter. Your sexual preferences or lack of thereof are disturbing."

With a resigned sigh the valkyrie chose the sensible path of least resistance and trudged across the room to catch the strategically required rest of her own on the second bed.


	12. Chapter 12

Chapter 12

The next morning caught Kenzi in a flurry of activity. Not that the girls had any way of knowing if it was morning or night but the kitsune proclaimed her waking time tantamount to sunrise and operated on that assumption. She did a thorough search of the premises, replicating the one executed by Tamsin before her arrival but paid less attention to the bedding and more attention to the door and to the tiny bathroom. Her findings were, in fact, much the same. The door suffered a couple of ineffectual kicks and Kenzi yelped as her knee connected to the hard surface with a bit excessive ardour. "_Chyort_!" she swore ethnically rubbing the tender area, "The room must be really under a spell – my batteries are recharged but my faepowers are like a low-potency dick – that is, low and no pleasure to anyone."

"I told you," Tamsin singsonged without bothering to get up.

"And the bathroom is simply disgusting, bare necessities, off-brand shampoo, no mirror," the kitsune went on with her litany.

"No shower curtain rail either," the blonde cut in gruffly, "Nothing sharp or cutting."

"No mirror!" Kenzi continued taking no notice of her more practically-minded cell-mate, "They can lock you up, they can take away the food – good for your figure, mind the pronoun, Tammy, _your_ figure, mine is perfect as it is, but how well do they expect us to fare without a mirror or any reflective surface? I am sure my hair is all snarled and I need to check for red hairs. Do you happen to have a looking glass somewhere in your purse?" Her tone got distinctly cajoling.

"Kidding?" the valkyrie gave a lopsided grin. "If I had a purse there would be a gun or a blade in it and we would be in noticeably less trouble than we are. If you are that desperate, run a tubful of water and enjoy your refection and I'll enjoy the silence in the meanwhile. Just keep in mind that Narcissus also started that way and didn't end well."

"What's wrong with the flower?" the younger girl gawped back in sincere astonishment.

"Have you read a book in your life? Gone to a literature class at school?" the valkyrie snorted and, observing Kenzi's blankish expression, shook her head ruefully, "Obviously not."

"Do romance novels count?" the girl asked sheepishly, "I definitely read about a Sven and a few cases of defloration thrown in but nothing on flora."

"Narcissus was a Greek who fell in love with his own reflection in the water and died of it," Tamsin explained deciding on a patiently edifying approach.

"If you're insinuating I can fall in love with myself, that's abominable! My heart's already taken, with one sick wolf who needs me while I'm parked here chatting with a useless piss-taking valkyrie," the girl pronounced with dignity and immediately changed gears when a mischievous flicker lit up her eyes and she lunged at the blonde for a bear-hug. "You're a genius, blondie, I knew it," Kenzi screamed into the other girl's ear making her wince from such attentions. "Reflective surface, bath-tub – that's what we need."

Dyson's heavy eyelids fluttered open with considerable effort on his part but instead of the little face he had hoped to see Lauren's tight-lipped mien came into focus.

"Where's Kenzi?" he whispered raspily and the doctor scraped up a clinical smile to cover a lie, "She's gone, needed some rest and a change of clothes."

"Right," the wolf gave a half-nod of understanding, "As she's out, spit it out, doc. What's the deal with me?"

"You need to rest, we'll talk later, the pain-killers are wearing off, I'll give you some more," Lauren tried evading the inevitable or at least stalling.

"No later, now, before Kenzi returns," the fae said stubbornly and though his voice wouldn't go above a mutter the blonde caught on his resolve, "and no pills until you tell me why my back feels like there is a burning-hot electrified rod stuck in it while I can't feel my legs beyond some residual tingling, as if I was sitting on them and they have gone numb."

"In a way," the doctor pressed her clipboard to her chest as if it was a shield. The amount of horrifying truth she had to dump on the wolf was weighing heavily on her shoulders and she knew she had to start somewhere. But what would be the hardest blow for her patient in his precarious state was the one-million question. Lauren decided to take her cue from the shifter's own obvious priorities exhibited in the order of his questions.

"Your spine sustained a grievous injury, Dyson," she said softly, "Too grievous even for your wolf healing powers to cope with." Lauren paused to draw in an addition breath that she suddenly felt she needed.

"Will I be walking?" the shifter forestalled her, his face unreadable but his gaze dimming with premonition.

"Yes, you will, eventually, after extensive physiotherapy, but not running," the doctor finally dragged her eyes from the spot she had chosen on the wall to the east of her patient. "You'll be permanently limping, Dyson, perhaps heavily enough to need a crutch or a stick. There's nothing I or any other doctor can do, it's a miracle you are alive, if you were a human … ."

"But I am not!" Dyson suddenly barked lifting his head from the pillow, "I am a wolf and you're telling me I'll be crawling around on some damned crutches instead of loping in the forest." His flare of devastation-fuelled anger died down as quickly as it surged and he fell back in total exhaustion.

"I am sorry," Lauren murmured dejectedly and the man hissed back not without sting, "You seem to be saying that quite a lot lately, since the Halt debacle."

"Cut it out, Dyson," the blonde let the clipboard hit the floor with a ping, "I am not responsible for what happened to you, either in Halt's laboratory or now. I am truly sorry for you but as your doctor I'm duty bound to give you a priceless piece of advice. When you're done feeling sorry for yourself and bemoaning your rabbit hunts, try concentrating on getting as well and as fast as you possibly can. For the sake of the girl whose very life might depend on you."

"What's up with Kenzi?" distraught as he was, the shifter zeroed in on what for him was the most significant part of Lauren's address. "Is she all right?"

The woman cursed her uncharacteristic unguarded outburst and debated informing the wolf further but couldn't bring herself to do it. There was absolutely nothing to be gained by telling Dyson that his ex-best friend and his Ash orchestrated his injury and took his girl to a location undisclosed and with intentions far from noble , but if the bombshell turned out to be the last straw breaking the already broken back Lauren would be looking at an eternity of regret and self-flagellation.

"All right?" the doctor raised an eyebrow, "Your ex-human girl-friend is turning into a kitsune and her still human mind is not taking it in its stride. She's barely holding onto reality, Dyson, and you're her only rock. Even if you are no longer able to hunt or chase rodents."

The shifter shut his eyes tightly and Lauren thought she had glimpsed something liquid in between his eyelids. "You were talking of some pain-killers, doc," he spoke up a minute later, the effort of keeping his voice even evident in his taut expression, "Douchebag as I've been, I hope, I still deserve them."

Bo was pacing the length of Trick's downstairs lair with the pent-up ferocity of a caged tiger. "Lauren was right on the money when she said they're both off their trolley. Kenzi is rightfully crazy and justifiably vengeful but Hale. Is it what spurned love does to people?"

"No, it's what power and piqued ego do to people," Trick murmured back an answer to what he felt was largely a rhetoric question but when Bo stopped pacing and looked at him quizzically he was obliged to add, "Take my word, I did my fair share of those when I was just a young king freshly come into power. You get so overwhelmed with the sense of grandeur and your own significance to the world that any small thing takes on epic proportions and is blown into an insult or betrayal."

"Less psycho analysis, more tactical planning, Gramps," the succubus huffed and resumed her groove-wearing on the carpeted floor. "Where might he be keeping them? The dungeon? Do you think it's worth a try? Bursting in, kicking a few fae asses, razing it to the ground?"

"Not sure. He would want to keep them somewhere better protected. The valkyrie and the kitsune would obviously tear his prison apart, brick by brick, Bo," the Blood King objected, "Besides, to take Kenzi was relatively easy – catch her at her weakest, threaten Dyson, exercising his Ash right to apprehend an unaligned criminal –she hasn't yet picked a side, remember. But to take the centuries-old Norse warrior would be a suicide mission and not only in terms of missing some bowels consequently, politically as well. Tamsin is a Dark fae, he couldn't have gone over the Morrigan's head on that."

The succubus stopped mid-stride and with an unmistakable relief pasted on her beautiful face turned to grab an extra pair of knives of the coffee-table, which was never used for coffee or tea for that matter. "Brainwave, Trick, trust an old politician to read the subcontext. I've got myself someone to grill for information," the brunette whirled towards the exit near-ecstatic at the prospect of some action before the old fae could go into an admonishing spiel.

"Sometimes I start thinking I need to handcuff them to something unmovable before I start talking wisdom," Trick murmured to himself when Bo's heels had clicked up the wooden stairs.


	13. Chapter 13

Chapter 13

Tamsin was looking skeptically as the water was filling the squeaky clean porcelain bath-tub. Kenzi was sitting, perched on the lip of the tub with a focused look and a meditative wrinkle to her forehead.

"So," the valkyrie was running low on kitsune-tolerance, "Are we gonna lure the guards in here and drown them? Or you have a spectacular suicide scene in mind? A small tip – this tub is not big enough for both of us, I suggest you go first."

"If we could lure the cougars in, we wouldn't need the water medium," the younger girl replied reasonably, "What we need is out of here and that's what I am working on."

"By getting a bath? Might help … my nose, if not our case –you're starting to smell, fox," Tamsin chortled unconvinced.

"Not that you're exactly smelling of roses, BO on top of too much beer does nothing to your allure, valkyrie," Kenzi obligingly reminded the blonde that she also had a bite to her by baring two rows of neat razor-sharp teeth to accompany her words.

"Ok, one deodorant-deficient body cancels out the effects of the other," Tamsin said soothingly, "Care to elaborate what exactly I am witnessing here?"

"When I was on my training vacation away with Dyson I took advantage of some spells of peace and quite, as in bored half to death, and did some researching on the faedom in general," Kenzi began and caved in under the other's doubt-laden gaze, "Ok, D-man practically glued a heavy volume to my hands and hovered over me all the time for further incentive. But as it turned out not only my physique got a boost, my memory now is near perfect and I can remember loads of useless information on the off-chance that one day it might come in handy. Like today."

"It was way before you were dumped in our lap, but once we, me and Bo, happened to have a brush with a nice sociable lady called Baba Yaga," the girl went on with her roundabout clarifications and saw the valkyrie give an eloquent wince of i-heard-about-the-bitch variety, "Turns out we totally mishandled the old girl, used her to curse Dyson and then shoved her into an oven, which didn't quite seem an overkill at that particular moment. But actually, there are several types of Yagas – we were lucky to land us a cannibal, though some of them are just secluded magicians and some more humanity-disposed might even land a helping hand from time to time to those who know how to ask. Just read Russian fairy tales, pretty illuminating."

"You sound so Trick," Tamsin murmured with a tinge of surprised respect. "So you diversified from romance Sven-novels."

"Lots of time on my hands, gigabytes of memory and I started with my ethnic background, planned to check the Bayun kitty next for good old times' sake but then our vacation was cut short," Kenzi jerked up a shoulder trying to prevent emotion from creeping into her face, "Bottom line, a Baba Yaga can be raised through a reflective service, bathtub should do as far as we're short of mirrors, and has a particularly handy set of skills to get us out of here. Curses on screwing-around dudes are not the only thing she can do."

"Why would she help us? And how do you know we won't get another psycho cannibal?" the blonde asked with more curiosity than misgiving.

"I don't know that. And we'll have to trade, horse-trade if need be," Kenzi turned off the tap and looked into the near-transparent sheet of water. "Every second we're losing here is killing me, Tams," she confided in a subdued voice, "If we don't get out of here soon, Kenzi's toast anyway. If you're not ready to risk, step back."

"A toss-up between being stuck in here with a half-crazy kitsune, at the mercy of the full-crazy Ash with my partner possibly dying somewhere out there and facing a quite possibly murderous fae to trade for our freedom?" two cold green eyes sparkled with adventurous mirth and the valkyrie leaned back against the door pushing it closed, "Please, proceed, my undomesticated friend."

Kenzi planted her small hands onto the lip of the tub and peered intensely into the pale bluish depth, her own taut and focused face staring back at her, then she muttered something quickly in Russian, the blonde's ears picking on something sounding remotely like _babushka_ and _izbushka_. For a second the water was undisturbed but then the surface reluctantly rippled and the kitsune repeated her chant until the ripples turned into bath-tub scaled tsunamis and splashed out onto the tiles bringing a small bent figure with them.

A tiny wizened old woman with a kerchief tied around her grey-haired head froze in the middle of the cramped bathroom looking incredulously and hesitantly from the one girl to the other. Suddenly she started waving her bony arms in front of her and rattled off in heavily accented English, "Leave me alone, I don't help naughty girls who choose the wrong men."

"I thought it's in your job description," Tamsin couldn't help wondering aloud while Kenzi turned to the old woman speaking soothingly in their native language, which seemed to relax Baba Yaga enough to look a bit more cooperative. The younger girl switched into the lingua franca for the valkyrie's benefit and went on to give the condensed version of their predicament to the new comer, "A bad, jealous man locked us in here against our will and charmed the room to neutralize our fae powers. He tried to kill the man I love to foist himself onto me."

"Men forcing their attentions on girls…," Baba Yaga seemed positively disgusted but still less than enthusiastic, "I told you I haven't done cursing men since I immigrated, had my fill of that back in Russia. In good old days people asked for swords or magic to fight the evil, these days women ask to sort their men out – make him stop playing around, get him off the booze. No, thank you, now it's my cousin's specialty."

"We don't need a curse, we'll deal with the scumbag ourselves once we're out of here, but we need an escape route, Babushka," Kenzi pleaded.

Baba Yaga turned round to look at the tub doubtfully, then measured the two girls with a disapproving gaze, "Both modernly skinny, will fit in. But what will I get for that?"

"Whatever you might want from a valkyrie and a kitsune," the Russian girl replied, hope lighting up in her eyes.

"My black cat went missing, the ungrateful beast ran away on a screwing mission or something. I want it found," the old woman stated flatly, "Who has ever seen a Yaga without her black cat? I'll be the laughing stock for my sisters."

"Wow," Kenzi breathed out with a hint of childish delight, "Baba Yaga in her flying stuppa with her black cat – classic!"

"You, the cold one from the North," the Yaga pointed a gnarled finger at Tamsin, "promise to find him and I'll take you out of here."

"Why me?" the blonde exclaimed, surprised and far from eager.

"The little fox smells," the old fae grumbled with a sideways glance towards the girl in question.

"I haven't grabbed a shower for a couple of days, you know, being caught, dragged here," Kenzi protested, "And the valkyrie is not so fresh either."

"You smell of a wild animal," the Yaga stepped closer to her and sniffed, "Of a fox and a bit of a wolf. My cat will be afraid of you and will run away again."

Under Kenzi's drilling eyes Tamsin had to give a pretend indifferent shrug and a yes, "Ok, I promise to find your cat if you get us both out of this cell." "Why do I always get stuck with a cat? First Raksasha, now this one," she lamented her cat-strewn lot, casting her mind back to the incident that nearly had deluded Dyson take the plunge off the roof , "I hate the lazy scheming fluffies."

The Yaga smiled contentedly and grabbed first Kenzi's hand, then Tamsin's making the girls come closer to the tub.

'Are your powers unaffected by the spell on the room?" the blonde enquired, suddenly latching onto the thorny part of their plan.

"The spell is too weak to affect a magic-wielding fae," the Yaga scoffed and under her gaze the water started rippling again. "Don't waste time, I want my pet back."

"Stop!" Kenzi's exclaimed and jerked her hand out of the old woman's grip. "Tamsin has made her trade, but not me. I also have something to ask and a favour to offer, "There is a very sick animal, a shifter, the wolf you smelled on me. You live in the woods, you commune with nature, you do magic. I want you to heal him and I'll pay whatever price you name."

The Yaga dropped the valkyrie's hand and put both of her own onto the sides of Kenzi's face. "Close your eyes and think of him, the last time you saw him," she said in Russian and the fox obeyed, Dyson's image floating to the fore-front of her mind effortlessly. In a second the woman resumed her grip onto the both girls' hands and tugged them toward the shimmering water. "I'll see what I can do and I'll think what I can ask in return, little fox," she replied in a low voice, restarting her magic to open the portal in the tub.

Roughly at the same time as the girls where taking a dive, Bo was standing arms akimbo in front of the Morrigan lounging onto a purple plush settee in a black laciest ever dress. "The fact that you disabled my guards and succu-bashed your way in here doesn't mean that you gonnna live through this encounter, darling," Evony drawled in her usual blaze tones, "I won't fall for your SM handcuffy stuff or the depth of your cleavage any more."

"I have come just to talk," Bo replied trying to sound both civil and forceful, "Your guards didn't believe me, so I convinced them in the most expedient way I could."

"To talk? What about?" the Morrigan didn't bother to stand though her lithe body tensed imperceptibly, ready to show what she had been chosen the Dark fae ruler for.

"Tamsin, she's missing, presumably taken by the Ash," Bo recounted tersely, "I've come to tell you about one of yours being captured."

"To tell me," Evony switched to openly disdainful, "My people don't get caught by the Light without my say-so."

"So you said so," the succubus jumped at her words swiftly, "Why would you sell your fae to Hale? And how clever is it anyway? In case your finger is not so on the pulse as you seem to be thinking, the Ash is slightly off-balance these days."

"Tamsin has disobeyed one too many orders of mine, aligned herself with the unaligned, discarding her loyalties," the Morrigan allowed a frown to crease her smooth brow, "I chose her punishment."

"You chose to fall for the silver-tongued pitch about how Tamsin captured can be used against the above mentioned unaligned," the succubus corrected boldly, "You've overplayed your hand here, Evony. You think once he's got his weapon, he'll share it with you against me. Oh, girl, you've got another massive think coming."

An ominous half-smile played on the Dark fae's full lips, "Presumptuous as ever. Claiming to gauge the two highest-ranking fae's plans with your little lust-filled brain."

"As well as Hale, I am a hereditary politician, lust-producing more than lust-filled on top of that, don't you forget it," Bo opted for royally arrogant, "Not sure what can be said about your origin, though. Hale is playing you like a fiddle, he kidnapped the girl he is madly in love with against her will and to ensure that I can't interfere he took the woman I hold dear. And in the same smooth move he got himself a succu-puppet who will do his bidding as long as the two I love most are in his power. You've given him all the strings, Evony, who do you think he'll pull them against first of all?"

The smile fell off the Morrigan's face closely followed by her confident expression. "He won't dare to overhaul the system, to disrupt the balance," she murmured.

"He's blinded with spurned love and the fresh sense of power," Bo threw another log into the fire, "There's no telling what he might do, and you are definitely on his like-and-keep list."

"Demand her back," the succubus pronounced resolutely, "She's your subject. And you'll see if he agrees."

The Morrigan picked herself up from the settee and straightened to look down on Bo from thee height her six-inch fuck-me shoes allowed her. "And if he refuses?" she asked blowing her minty breath into the beautiful face of the other woman.

"Then take the koushang he's wearing, you, the great dark fae can surely pull that off against the unsuspecting siren," the succubus instructed locking her blue-swirling eyes with Evony's. "I'll get my hands free and maybe a bit dirty whereas you get immunity against me. Both of us will sleep easier."


	14. Chapter 14

Chapter 14

"Welcome to my humble abode," pronounced the Yaga with a sweeping gesture over a crumbling cabin elevated on a pair of curiously shaped leg-like struts.

"For once not a socially approved understatement," Tamsin sneered, taking in the below modest appearance of the hut.

"Only a fractional improvement on your last residence," Kenzi intoned and gave a low whistle of admiration, "A real Baba Yaga's chicken-legged hut in the woods, the quintessential fae smart house. The fables say it can walk and understand orders."

"Well, it used to, back in the day, on the native soil, but since we immigrated it has gone deaf," the Yaga explained, patting the wall of the cabin with an affectionate hand. Both girls gave an involuntary flinch when the construction seemed to shudder as if responding to the caress. The door creaked on its rusty hinges opening of its own and the Yaga climbed inside followed by the two other fae, who suddenly grew hushed and slightly abashed. The interior of the hut turned out significantly more spacious than the outside view might have suggested and unexpectedly light and airy. No traditional Russian oven, no rustic wooden chairs and table – a modern-looking fitted kitchen, a softly humming fridge and some practical Ikea-style furniture instead were strewn around the multi-purpose ante room with a few doors at the back leading to possibly private Yaga-quarters. The only thing hinting heavily at the occupant's unorthodox practices was a collection of dry herbs and unidentifiable organic looking pieces of something on the shelves lining one of the walls. One of the corners sported two big bowls with milk and kibbles and a small off-white rug haired over with black patches of fur.

'That's my Vasiliy's place," the old fae whined in a surprisingly plaintive tone, "The apple of my eye, the joy of my depressed days." She whirred round to face the blonde and practically barked up into the taller woman's arrogant high-cheekboned face, "I"ve done what you asked of me – got you out of your charmed prison, now do your part – find my Vasya!"

"Yeah, you've got us out and into … what? A cabin in the back of nowhere? Are we still in the same realm we started out in this morning?" the valkyrie scowled letting her unease show.

"You're less than 100 miles from Toronto, silly girl," the Yaga muttered disparagingly, "Who do you take me for? My crazy curse-wielding cousin who chose to retreat to a realm of her own cos the authorities here disagreed with her diet? She has a taste for fresh human meat, female preferably, you know." She explained for Tamsin's benefit while Kenzi nodded knowingly.

"She had," the kitsune couldn't stop herself from sticking her oar in. "Before Bo cooked her _au jus_."

"Good," the Yaga replied curtly, "One person off my Christmas-presents list and no more ugly scarves from her at birthdays."Clearly unfazed by the news the old fae drilled the valkyrie with a heavy stare and the younger woman gave a resigned sigh, "Ok, but how should I find the damned cat? Smother myself in catmint and stroll the woods?"

"My cucumbers, my precious salted cucumbers made to a unique old folk recipe, there's nothing Vasiliy likes more," the Yaga explained proudly extracting a glass jar filled with yellowish vegetables form one of the shelves.

"Oh, pickles," Tamsin looked in surprise at something which she had clearly never considered a good cat snack.

"Not pickles, stupid, _Babushka's_ salted cucumbers, the best vodka chaser ever," the Yaga corrected and added nostalgically, "A glass of vodka, a bite of my cucumbers and you feel like you are still at home. Me and Vasiliy, we like our five-o'clock Russian way."

Kenzi cut her eyes suspiciously to the cat's water bowl and sniffed the air. "I do hope it's water in that bowl," she muttered and sneezed when her recently boosted nose got a whiff of something much less innocuous.

Minutes later Tamsin, with a confident set to her shoulders, made her way out of the cabin and into the woods with a cucumber in her hand and the Yaga plopped herself into a recliner and measured Kenzi with a sullen gaze. "Now, to your sick wolf, girl," she started in the language of the cucumber-land.

Lauren walked into the room, her nose buried into her clipboard, and came to an abrupt stop when she realized the bed was empty. Seized with panic, she whirled around nearly dropping her chart and with a painful thud against her ribs her heart settled into a less elevated beat. Dyson was standing at the wall with his one hand against the bedside table and the other one gripping the IV-stand for support. Despite the double prop it was obvious the wolf was on the brink of nose-diving any minute and the doctor rushed over to him. Between the iv-stand and the desperately sweating woman Dyson managed to limp his way back on his disobeying legs to the bed and crashed onto it in utter exhaustion and no small amount of pain.

"What the hell you thought you were doing?" Lauren yelled, finding her voice and fuelled by worry.

"I thought I should take your advice and stop feeling sorry for myself," the wolf panted, "Tried a pro-active approach."

"It's too early, Dyson," the woman turned her indignation down, "Your body needs more time."

"Before I can start hobbling around like a one-legged duck?" the shifter retorted and saw Lauren's face darken. "And more importantly, where's Kenzi? Don't tell me she's gone to change and refresh, you've used that one already."

"She might be a while," the blonde admitted in a low voice.

"A while? Why?" Dyson hoisted himself up in a semi-sitting position and the doctor distractedly made a mental note that the shifter seemed to be regaining his strength faster than she had expected. In view of that observation and of the amber-flashing eyes of her patient she chose to take a step back, out of claw-sprouting arms' range, before replying.

"She's been taken, Dyson, arrested by Hale," she started tentatively, "after what Courtaud did to you, she went a full homicidal kitsune on him despite the Ash's orders."

"She killed the Red Wolf," Dyson muttered astonished.

"And attacked the Ash," Lauren added grimly, "for setting you up." She detailed that shocker to the wolf with clinical precision devoid of personal opinions and low on adjectives and stopped for breath watching the man's face set into an unfathomable mask.

"Bo is working on getting her out," the blonde tried to sound consoling. "Right now she's our best bet."

"Hale personally handed me the gun," Dyson finally gritted out, "But why? My best friend?"

"Age-old classic story – jealousy," the doctor signed, her own thoughts diverted to one cheeky valkyrie by association, "He is in love with Kenzi."

A turmoil of disbelief, rage, a tiny flicker of guilt played out on Dyson's face in a quick succession and then all emotion was gone. "That means he won't hurt her and we have some time," the wolf remarked in a matter-of-fact way and went on with unwavering resolution, "Drug me up to the eyeballs, if need be, doc, but get me out of this bed. I need to be functional."

"To do what? Storm the Ash's compound, go plead with Hale?" Lauren answered sensibly, "You're caught at a huge disadvantage, the best you can do is bide your time and recover in the proper way. If we rush it, we'll just aggravate your injury and you might end up even more crippled."

"The king that betrays me is no longer my king, the Ash who tries to kill me and steal my girl-friend is dead. First to me, later he'll be just that for the rest of the world. My disablement is my only advantage, Lauren, it gives me the element of surprise," the fae tried to convey his reason and his sense of urgency to the woman who was his only possible ally at the moment.

Whatever Lauren was about to reply to that was interrupted by the semi-entrance of one of her assistants. "Doctor Lewis," the nurse poked her head into the room, "There's a special delivery for you in the lab. Your need to sign for it."

"But I didn't order anything," the blonde said astonished, "What is it? Medical supplies?"

"Doesn't look that way," the nurse shook her head, perplexed, "It's something rather big and rectangular. Like a big standing mirror and there's a card attached to it."

Lauren hurried out and faced a burly delivery man holding the object in question with a clipboard pressed under his arm. The doctor looked doubtfully over the thing and zeroed in on the card stuck in a fold of the wrapping paper.

"I'm from the Internet shop, Ma'am, will you sign for it?" the delivery man asked pointing with his eyes at the clipboard and the blonde dutifully signed for the questionable windfall, proceeding to snatch the card. "Get well soon, my wolf," it read, "This is something for you to see." There was no name and the handwriting was most probably that of the shop-assistant or a clerk but Lauren had little doubt about the provenance of the gift, there was only one person who could have called Dyson that. Unless it was another ruse by Hale. But Lauren figured if the Ash wanted any more harm inflicted on his former partner there were easier methods at his disposal.

"Could you please carry it in there," the doctor finally decided and motioned to the door of the patient's room.

Hale was roused from his Ash business by a shrill sound of the phone on his desk. "Morrigan's here to see me?" he asked, astonished, into the receiver, "Let her in, would not be courteous of me to keep the leader of the Dark waiting in my … ." Before he could finish his sentence, the door opened and a lithe figure in the customary aggressive red made her theatrical entrance.

"Oh, my little Ashy ally," the Morrigan drawled floating across the room towards the siren and giving him a hug of uncalled-for affection before sitting gracefully down into one of the plush chairs. "Though I have to admit, "ashy" doesn't really go with your skin tone, darling."

Hale frowned straightening his jacket after Evony's bout of touchy-feely. "To what do I owe the dubious pleasure?" he asked with no pretense at cordiality.

"Just dropped by to ask how my girls are doing?" the woman intoned, making a careful study of her scarlet finger-nails and flicking an imaginary speck off her fur mantle.

"Your girls?" the siren asked.

"Yes, the unaligned kitsune, who is strictly speaking no one's as yet but I might have a shot at converting her to our Dark cause, and the rebellious dark fae who is my subject temporarily entrusted to your keeping," the Morrigan obligingly clarified.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Hale replied dispassionately looking straight into the heavily-mascara-ed huge eyes.

"The ones we agreed to capture and hold prisoners as the ultimate weapon against one powerful succubus, who happens to have a soft spot for them?" Evony was not looking amused any more. "I want at least one of them in my hands, it was ways too magnanimous of me to let you get both. Give me Tamsin back."

Hale's blank stare didn't waver, "With all due respect to my opposite number I don't understand what you're talking about. Your people are your people, I am not holding any of them. Tamsin might be binging it somewhere. As to the kitsune, her whereabouts are a mystery to me, too. Remember she's searched for killing my prisoner."

"We've agreed," Evony hissed leaning forward in her chair.

"Have you got a copy of the agreement with you?" the Ash enquired smoothly.

The woman rose sharply and measured the siren with a half-respectful glance. "The little siren is maturing into an unscrupulous Light Ash," she gave a short laugh, "Fool me once … well, you know the saying. Was a pleasure to have business with you. Just make sure you don't get too big for your Ashy britches."

With a disdainful look Evony sailed out of the office, leaving Hale internally jubilant at another smooth move of his. "The Ash does have teeth, suck it up, Evony. Daddy would be finally proud," he murmured to himself sitting back to his papers but a slight unease was churning inside. The Morrigan didn't value Tamsin too much and was practically careless about settling on an oral arrangement, why bother pay a personal visit, why give up so quickly if it was important enough to drag her skinny label-clad ass over to the light fae compound?

His hand went automatically to his breast pocket, where his recent anti-succubus acquisition was, but found nothing – the pocket was empty. Hale flashbacked onto the Morrigan's hug and sprang to his feet. "Bitch!" he exclaimed as loudly as his recently damaged throat would allow and grabbed the receiver. "Stop the Morrigan! Don't let her out of the compound!" he yelled into the phone and sprinted out of the office and along the corridors towards the front door. He stopped panting on the stone porch of the front entrance to his residence, accompanied by several guards, and scanned the drive – there was no Morrigan, no dark fae vehicles in sight.

"The Ruler of the Dark exited through the back door where her limousine was waiting to collect her, sir," one of the guards belatedly informed the Ash, "they left a couple of minutes ago."

"Morons!" Hale swore at his subordinates, "Why didn't you stop her?"

"We rushed over here first, sir," the second guard joined in with a guilty air, "We thought this is the entrance for important guests."

"Exactly, very important guests," came from the left and right out of left field and a feminine dark-clad figure stepped out of the shadows and onto the stairs. Before Hale had time to put a face to the voice his guards were down with blissful smiles and Bo gripped the siren into another far-from-friendly restraining hug. "Now we'll talk," she announced with a wink full of promise.


	15. Chapter 15

Chapter 15

Bo leaned into Hale, pressing him into the wall with all the angry succubus strength she could muster. "Believe me, this kiss will be unexpectedly dazing," she promised and the siren's face reflected the fact that he did believe her, seconds before his features broke into a loopy smile, characteristic of those under the succubus influence but still alive. "Now that you're hanging out alone, without your guards or the kousang to shield you, we're clear that the only reason you are not chi-sucked empty is that I need you," the brunette went on invigorated by her chi fix. "You're taking me to where you've been holding Kenzi and Tamsin, now!" Giddy from both his life force extraction and concurrent aroused reaction, Hale could only nod dreamily and murmur, "They're in an outbuilding in the depth of the inner yard of the compound." With her one hand still clasping the Ash's shirt Bo made them both bend and retrieved a gun from under one of the guards' belt.

"My charm is deathly, but this one is much quicker," she told herself softly and tucked the piece of weapon between her own pants waistline and the warm flesh of her back. The woman pushed her new prisoner forward without letting go of him for a second and in this manner they marched across the yard and towards the outbuilding where Hale barked at the lonely guard at the door to hand over the key and disappear, which the startled fae did with a rapidity implying either some super vanishing abilities or years of practice.

The Ash turned the key and cracked open the door when Bo's hand on his shoulder assumed an arresting quality. "Hold it here. That's it? A windowless room, a solid door and a half-snoring guard to contain two powerful fae?" the succubus asked with a note of disbelief at such a negligent approach to imprisonment.

"The cell is under a spell, under a similar one they used in the Hecuba prison, any fae is devoid of his powers once inside," the siren slurred, succubus intoxication still coursing through his system.

"Thanks for the heads-up, then you go in and bring them out," the brunette gave his back a mighty shove and Hale practically fell inside the en-suite-like prison. There was a sound of a body hitting the floor, an ouch and a surprised exclamation, but no voices Bo had been expecting to hear. "Kenzi, Tams, it's me," the brunette called out keeping well away from the threshold but the silence was not broken. Impatient and more than a little alarmed, she jerked the gun from under her belt and, thus armed, stepped carefully inside.

What she saw was a perfectly empty room and a flustered Hale emerging from the bathroom. "I can't believe it, but they're not here," he spread his arms in incredulity, "I swear, Bo, I don't know what happened. They were here and now they're gone."

With a frown and a pointed aiming of the gun at the Ash, Bo made her own sweep of the room and had to agree with her captive on the "they're not here" point.

"Either you're lying to me and they haven't been here in the first place and then I'll have to get the necessarily information in a less civilized and Ash-friendly way," she warned with a not-so-veiled threat in her voice, "or the girls found a way to get out, which would be a much healthier option for both of us."

The siren felt an uncomfortable shiver run the length of his spine, he was somehow sure that he stood a very slim chance of enjoying the Ash unfriendly way Bo was referring to. "Check the security footage," he stumbled upon something to convince the disgruntled succubus, "on the computer in my study. There's a concealed camera above the door here, you'll see them entering and leaving or not leaving."

For a while Bo debated the expedience of wasting her time on that but concluded that establishing this point might be pivotal and nodded. "Ok, I will, and you'll stay in here while I am off to check whether you really have a death wish," she grinned at her former friend, "Enjoy your downtime and think which one of the fae you've cheated and wronged recently you'd least like to face next."

The brunette was out of the room in a flash, slamming the door behind her and locking it, and headed off back to the Ash's study.

Lauren was looking over the freshly delivered gift in confusion. "A big stand-up mirror?" the doctor asked out loud, "That's what Kenzi wants you to see?"

Dyson tore his eyes off the enigmatic card he was holing within the reading distance of his face and let his hand drop onto the bed tiredly. "Our's not to question why," he mumbled under his breath, "Our's to wait and see if my girl is a well-intentioned genius loose cannon or a fully off-her-rocker fox. Either way I am not going anywhere, doc. And the fact that she ordered the delivery proves that she's free."

The blonde ran her fingers over the heavy frame. "If she escaped from the Ash, someone would be already here to intercept her when she comes for you," she countered reasonably.

"Valid point, hopefully, they haven't noticed her escape yet," the wolf remarked, "which brings me back to what I told you before. Get me ambulatory, Lauren, I need to be marginally ready for the scenario you've just mentioned. I won't let them use me against her like they did the first time around. I won't let them ambush her again."

There was no begging note in his voice, only grim determination, and Lauren stopped her examination of the mirror to come and stand at the foot of the bed. "You do realize that by making you feel better now I'll make you feel much worse later?" she said without really asking, "you're not stable, Dyson, any interference may cause irreparable damage."

"More irreparable damage than has already been caused?" the shifter shot back, "A wolf who can only crawl is pathetic enough, but a wolf who will let his mate be harmed is not life-worthy."

"Kenzi can fight her own battles," Lauren shook her head, still unconvinced.

"It's not her battles, I've let her down often enough – I dragged her back to town though I knew she was not ready and needed more training. Hale confided his love for her to me once but I ignored it - I was too drunk then and too wrapped in my own feelings later to take his into consideration. I've got disused to unalloyed medieval savagery and failed to take down Courtaud," Dyson's speech grew feverish, "And now when she is in double danger – from the jealousy-crazed Ash and from her own encroaching insanity – I can't be vegging out here."

Lauren's face darkened and her lips set in a thin line when she answered his appeal, "I'll do what you're asking of me, Dyson." With a somber expression of someone who recognizes the necessity though loathes the course of action required she trudged out of the patient's room and made it over first to the medicine cabinet and then to her desk with an armful of tubes and phials.

She consulted her files on shifters' physiology and sifted through the drugs, setting aside several items. A while later she made it back to her patient.

"I can give you something that will numb the pain, will give you an extraordinary boost and will forcibly repair the severed brain-limbs communication. It won't last, though – we are buying you some time but the price might prove exorbitant," she explained in a cold clinical voice stepping over to Dyson's bedside. Her one hand swabbed the wolf's exposed forearm with an antiseptic pad, the other was clutching a syringe.

"Time is all I need," the shifter replied evenly and Lauren pressed the needle to his flesh, her thumb hovering over the plunger, ready to release the transparent fluid into his bloodstream. At that moment, however, the transparency of the drug looked suddenly marred and the doctor froze – greenish specks were dancing on the small plastic tube, as if a reflection of a distant flashlight. Dyson's unnaturally relaxed posture also changed rapidly as his nostrils flared. "There's a new smell, Lauren, that of forest," he sounded incredulous, "of pine needles and of a fox. Am I delirious again?"

Instead of replying the doctor whirled in place and faced the mirror that was now a riot of swirling colours and a mire of fluorescence. The reflexive surface flexed and parted like water to reveal a tiny figure with a mass of tousled dark hair. The figure stepped out of the frame as if coming off a picture and gave a yelp as it rushed in a barely eye-perceptible flash towards the bed and its resident wolf. First, Lauren followed the progression of the figure but immediately turned away, blushing at the open display of affection the lovers launched as much as by Dyson's evident vulnerable delight at seeing his girl.

The wolf's arms went around the frail shoulders drawing Kenzi closer to him, as if to check if she was real, and the kitsune didn't need much prodding. In a fluid leap she straddled his waist and started raining kisses on all the sheet-free parts of him first, flinging the sheets aside when they got in her way then. Her huge silver-grey eyes lit up with love and lust and her small cool fingers snaked all over Dyson, getting closer to parts that mattered at an alarming speed. The shifter gave a smothered gasp when the fox hit the bull's eye but it turned into a groan just as soon and Dyson's hands pressed Kenzi'a arms to her sides, arresting her wiggling-fumbling motions.

"As much as I am happy to announce that I am far from numb down there, my love, it's a bit too soon for rigorous exercise for me," he tried for a smile that came out all quivery, "that's beside the fact our good doctor is probably less then thrilled to bear witness to this."

Kenzi stilled on top of him, her breathing calming and her eyes losing their intensity. "I am hurting you," she whispered remorsefully, "that's my damn fox running off the rails at every provocation."

"I quite liked that particular provocation, can I take a rain check?" Dyson's voice was still not steady and his hand went in a relaxing circle across the girl's back.

Lauren's delicate cough, meant as a universal sign for "can I interrupt your important but publicly inappropriate business here", set the fox on a more practical track. She sprang off the wolf, careful not to put any pressure on his body and hurried to pick up the discarded sheets and cover him again.

"Thanks for the hospitalizing hospitality, Lolo," she chirped, "But that's high time we moved out of here.'

"Why? Where? How?" the doctor enumerated the question words with a few to spare on her list.

"One at a time, Hotpants. Cos this place reeks of the asshole of an Ash and last we spoke you said you can't do much more for Dyson," Kenzi answered, her body tensing, and pointed an accusatory finger at the syringe, still clasped in Lauren's hand, "And what the flying duck is that one for? I caught a few words of your pre-injection speech while I was in transit and I distinctly didn't like them. And I didn't like the D-man's "I'm-all-for-another-sacrifice" mien here either."

A quick complicit glance the wolf and the doctor exchanged sealed their conspiratorial understanding without words. "I asked Lauren to speed up my treatment, up the dosage etcetera," Dyson hurried to give a vague appeasing reply, "she was more for the go-slow course but I nagged her into complying."

Kenzi's protective stance relaxed and she measured the other woman with a meditative look, "Put your certified poisons away for now. I am getting Dyson out of here and on an alternative treatment course."

"And I come up with my where? and how? again" the blonde said aridly, her doctor's mode kicking in.

"Magic and fae-folk wisdom will pick up where the traditional medicine driven by pharmaceutical giants has failed," the fox announced with more cheerfulness than she really felt. "And that's about all you need to know now." She moved over to Dyson's side and threaded an arm under his shoulders. "I found someone who can help, Dyson. Can you trust me on that? And if you do, do you think you can get up and as far as that mirror over there, Dy?" she asked with concern.

Dyson assessed the distance and looked doubtful but rallied under the girl's hopeful gaze. "I can sure do the trust thing, babe, and if my doctor rustles up a pair of crutches I might try the getting to the mirror part," he finally answered swallowing a lump that had formed in his throat at the mention of crutches.

Lauren appeared not sold on the concept and ready to dig her heels in. "Dyson's my patient and he's in a precarious enough state to make any transfer, even through a magical mirror, dangerous. I can't let you take him, Kenzi," she made a shot at being sensible, hoping with all she had the fox wouldn't get her claws out on her again. But Kenzi didn't bother to get physical, she merely awarded the blonde with a full kitsune-teeth smile, "I am sure you'll reconsider, Lolo, as the best you can offer your patient here is a set of the above mentioned crutches. You've saved him out of immediate danger, you've saved his life, you've done enough. Besides, you're still a slave to the Ash. What kind of moral dilemma will you get yourself into, if the next moment he comes in to arrest Dyson or butt in with his treatment in any other nefarious way?"

Lauren was staring at the girl, slack-jawed, thrown off by this swinging from unbalanced wildness to sensibility while Kenzi went on with her instructions, "You'll stay here and claim a complete "out-of-the-loop" status when a stack-blowing Ash barges in looking for us. You'll say Dyson has simply vanished and he'll have to believe you as the same mishap came his way with me and Tams. You'll find Bo and tell her to stay put, you'll tell her all you know and that we're fine and Tams will soon get in touch."

The doctor slowly nodded and transferred a questioning look onto Dyson who, reading her correctly, gave an affirmative nod, "Get those damned oversized chopsticks here, I am ready for the trip."


	16. Chapter 16

Chapter 16

Bo was staring at her lover caught somewhere mid-way between marginal relief and worry gathering anew. "You're telling me Kenzi and Tams got out somehow and Kenzi appeared here through this piece of glass and took Dyson? I have a whole bunch of questions here, hon."

"None of which can I answer," the doctor shook her head tiredly, "We'll have to trust Kenzi to take care of both of them and wait for Tamsin to re-surface for further clarification. And pardon my petty selfish human selfish but at the moment I am a bit more concerned about Hale storming in after having lost all his prisoners and hostages and a hefty chunk of his self-esteem in one go. Who might he take out his chagrin on, I wonder?"

Bo pulled the blonde into a tight hug. "I won't let him do anything to you, Lauren, " her warm breath tickled the doctor's ear, "besides, right now our not-so-good Ash is in a bit of a bind himself."

"Which he will get out of sooner or later, being the Ash and all, and with me still his rightless servant," Lauren went on stubbornly.

"Don't be afraid…," the succubus started on her comforting spiel again only to be cut mid-pep.

"But I am," the blonde got out from between her lover's encircling arms, "I am afraid of what he can do to me, now that all of you, the supernatural beings are out of his grasp. And even more than that I am afraid of losing you, Bo." Her last words, barely above the whisper but razor-sharp with raw emotion made the brunette gasp. "We've never really talked, Bo, not since my Halt escapades," the doctor said softly, "And Tamsin. I saw the way you look at her and it doesn't take a succubus to read your sexual aura burning hot whenever she is around, which has been rather often lately, I should say."

For a second Bo looked so utterly miserable that Lauren felt a real sadist for bringing the subject up in the first place. She was just about to call the showdown off when the brunette spoke up. "I won't stoop to denying what should be obvious for someone who knows me as well as you do, Lo," she admitted, "But the down-and-dirty truth is that I am a succubus brought up by human parents. All through my childhood I read books about princesses and one true love and ended up with a physique of a sexual predator. As it stands now, I have a much better control over my feelings than over my body. I love you, Lauren, I know it in my every bone but the parts of me that are not bone push me towards the valkyrie. I had a frigging hard choice when it was you and Dyson on my menu. And now I am ready to make that choice again and it will be the same. But …"

"But ironically, that's what you need – the frisson of choice, the new flavours on your menu. Once you've tried vanilla, you need strawberry. Even if you chuck the strawberry, next time you might crave chocolate," the doctor finished for her.

"I love _you_," Bo articulated looking right into the blonde's misted eyes.

"I know and I am lucky to be loved by someone like you," Lauren whispered not quite trusting her voice to be loud, "But you are unlucky to be a girl with a succubus body and with a big loving noble heart. Guess the only way to reconcile these and not to lose you is for me to grow a broad mind."

Before either of the women could think of what to say next or of a way not to crumble completely, the door swung open and the laboratory could suddenly boast of another fae beauty.

"Sweetie," the smooth arrogant voice drawled leisurely, "Long time no see, wait, not long enough. Have you seen my new bijou?" And the Morrigan passed a flirtatious hand over her lace- and kousang-covered chest.

"What do you want here?" the succubus tried to look pugnacious and stepped forward shielding the human doctor just in case Evony was in an extra insidious mode. "It's the Light Ash territory and you've already outstayed your welcome when you went all kleptomaniac on his possessions."

"And where is my young siren friend, by the way?" the other woman inquired with a snort, "Singing to the fish after his last brush with the succubus?"

"He's alive and well enough," Bo forced out, not sure herself if she was happy about that piece of fact.

"But caught red-handed at breaking a couple of major rules of good behaviour for the poor constrained and constipated Light fae higher-ups," the Morrigan went on smoothly, "attempting to engineer the murder of a light law-enforcement officer, kidnapping a dark fae without my written consent. I am sure we can rustle up some more misdeeds if we are searching enough or imaginative enough." Evony grew practically dreamy-eyed at the possibility.

"How do you know about Dyson?" Lauren couldn't help her curiosity.

"Blonde and nosy are not my type, ask Vex," the Dark fae commented disparagingly but got back on track under Bo's no less inquisitive stare. "I have my sources, which I can see no point in concealing. Your Grand-daddy clued me in. And don't go all i-can't-believe-it on me, honey. Men are usually happy to help me out."

"Trick is bitch-resistant," Bo shot back. "And never does anything without a damn good reason you, stupid cow, might have missed while admiring yourself," she added silently to herself.

"That he might be but he's also the one to recognize a perfect opportunity when it comes alone," Evony suddenly shed a significant part of her facetiousness, "The same as me he believes that there's sufficient ground for de-throning the Ash for abuse of power and general crazy douchebag-ness. And the same as me he believes that there's an ideal candidate to take the position who has reasonable chances to succeed in the power grab if endorsed by both the Light elders at his prodding and by the Dark covert influence agents at my instigation."

Bo felt a chilly row of goose bumps settle on her skin at the thought she might know the identity of the ideal candidate. She didn't have to stew in her misgivings for long as the Morrigan announced with a cheerful rising intonation, "Ta-da! Everyone's favourite succubus for the Ash!"

"I knew you were mad but for Trick to take part in this piece of farce?!" Bo shook off her confusion, forcing herself into an angry reaction.

"It's a win-win, actually, my busty would-be-colleague-in-office," the Dark fae continued undaunted. "You get the authority to protect your lovely doctor, to free her from servitude if you are so inclined, to save your other loony friend from prosecution for knifing the Red Wolf. You return your family to power, which is centuries overdue, really. And I get the Ash I can feel cozy with." The Morrigan batted her eyelids and fingered the amulet around her neck with relish, "Not to mention majorly turned-on. Believe me, meetings can be fun."

Tamsin plopped her worn-out self onto a conveniently placed stump and stretched her long legs in front of her. "Pickles," she murmured surveying the bait cucumber in her hand with a suspicious look. "Woods,' her disgusted tone ratcheted up a notch. "What am I? A cat nanny?" she asked the nearest bush. "No, just an awful misunderstanding of a valkyrie in love with a succubus and in debt to a baba Yaga," she answered her own query with a sigh and picked herself up, dusting her behind.

"Kitty-kitty," the blonde called out in a mock-mellifluous voice waving the cucumber in the air, "The best pickles in town!"

There was not a ripple of leaves in sight, the woods remained uncooperative and no cat hurried to savour the salty offering. Though the Yaga had said that Vasiliy couldn't have strayed far and was hungry whenever he was not sleeping, Tamsin was getting progressively convinced that for once the damned animal had found a more enticing activity or a better meal somewhere far enough to give the valkyrie an extensive tour of the wooded vicinity. Another hundred-metre cross-country ramble later the blonde leaned against a tree in a thoroughly downhearted mode. "Of all the things I could be doing now," she confided in the flora around her, waxing eloquent in the silence of the uninhabited area, "I am on a wild goose chase after a pet of questionable tastes who is most probably shagging a lady kitty or two somewhere in the outskirts of the city while I'm twisting my ankles over the rough terrain."

Her hand slipped over her jacket pocket and was instantly comforted by a solid feel of a square metal object in her pocket. "Odin bless Kenzi, her considerate nature and her nimble thieving fingers," the woman broke into a grin and extracted a flask her foxy companion had managed to slip into her pocket before they parted ways, "I so need to fortify my flagging spirits, even if with the Yaga's stolen and dubious hooch."

She unscrewed the cap and inhaled the pungent smell that immediately hit her nostrils. "Things we do for honour," the valkyrie saluted the trees around and gulped down the liquid scrunching her face in grossed-out delight.

A sudden soft rustling sound interrupted the libation process and Tamsin whirled round towards the source of the noise. An enormous black cat was padding right in her direction from behind the nearest spot of shrubbery on delicate paws and with an expression on his face that was as close to craving as his cat's features were physically able to set themselves into. He approached the blonde, sat down on his haunches in front of her and licked his mouth in an adorable begging gesture. His green eyes were zeroed in on the flask in Tamsin's right hand while the vegetable in her left hand remained utterly neglected.

"There's nothing he likes more than pickles?!" the blonde barked torn between exasperation and amused relief, "My ass! Come here, you, alcoholic feline!" She furiously chucked the past-its-prime cucumber into the grass and extended her both arms towards the cat, the one wielding a seductively tilted flask, the other ready for the cat grab.

When a while later she wound her way back to the chicken-legged cabin pressing victoriously the jacket-wrapped animal to her side, she was welcomed by the sight of the Yaga sitting rather forlornly on the small porch with a book in her lap. "You have found him, Norse warrior!" the old woman perked up as soon as her eyes landed on the furry bundle. "Don't he look pretty in your grey jacket!" the Yaga gushed seizing the cat and pressing him to her shawl covered scrawny chest.

"The beast only agreed to be wrapped and transported when he finished off my flask," the blonde commented aridly observing a random scratch on her wrist, "someone here might be heading straight towards AA at break-neck speed." She was about to add a snark or two but decided to save her breathe as the other fae was clearly caught up in her family reunion moment and impervious to unwelcome remarks.

"Where's Kenzi?" Tamsin asked instead, "And did you get Dyson?"

"They are both inside," the Yaga tore herself from her cat-fascination session, "I decided to give them some time together after I told them I can't help the wolf."

_Author's Note: Sorry, guys, this one is shorter. Couldn't resist ending it on a dramatic note. Promise, next chapter soon to follow and with a lot of Kenzi. _


	17. Chapter 17

Chapter 17

Tamsin caught herself actually stroking the cat's pitch-black gleaming fur practically in sync with his rhythmic purring. It felt almost like stroking the long shiny strands of dark-brown hair of the woman she couldn't hold from her thoughts for long and the valkyrie felt obliged to hastily withdraw her hand in a dream-shattering move.

"I am so not a cat person," she explained to the Yaga, still misty-eyed over her retrieved fugitive pet, "In fact, not much of a dog person either. But I am definitely a wolf person and that one wolf is at the forefront of my concerned mind right at this moment. You said you could heal him and now you're reneging."

"I never said I could," the old fae replied unruffled by the unconcealed note of accusation in the blonde's words. "I said I'll see what I can do. And so I did, I saw and I said I couldn't heal him."

"He is her life," Tamsin repositioned her slightly shaking hand onto the warm animal's back as if seeking to calm her jitters.

"He is not dying, just incapacitated," the Yaga reasoned.

"If I brought your Vasiliy back with his paws out of order and unable to run around, do you think he'd be ecstatically purring now in your lap and you'd be happy and content tweaking his velvety ears?" the valkyrie stumbled over the word velvety unsure how such a poetic descriptive had popped in her pragmatic mind in the first place. She tentatively touched the inside of the said ear with the tip of her finger and suppressed a wow at its authentically velvety quality. "And Dyson is not an animal, he's a proud warrior and a wild forest-roaming wolf. His very essence would be destroyed if he stayed that way forever."

"Save the drama, girl," the Yaga looked the younger woman in the face, "I don't need telling how much a crippled body can cripple a wolf's soul. Or how much in love the fox is. So much so that she might be the one capable of doing what I can't." At that Tamsin and Vasya both looked up at the old woman slack-jawed – Tamsin in surprise and the cat in a yawn.

When a while later the valkyrie came inside the cabin after a delicate warning knock she found Dyson and Kenzi in a tight embrace on a bear skin in the corner of the spacious living room next to the fire place. The black and red-haired girl was hugging the big silver-grey wolf prostrate in an odd unanimal-like position with his hind legs stretched behind him helplessly.

"He doesn't want to speak with me, Tammy," the kitsune whispered without moving an inch, "He is not angry with me, just doesn't know what to say. I told him I was bringing him to a place where he'd be helped. I told him I'd get him healed."

"And you told him the truth – you can get him healed," Tamsin blurted out, disinclined to test the fragility of the kitsune's mental condition or frazzle the shifter's nerves any further.

Kenzi's energy switch was immediately flipped on, if she had upright ears she would be pricking them the way her wolf was at that moment. "How? What do I need to do?" she exclaimed getting gently disentangled from the wolf and springing up to look the blonde right in the eye.

"Look, the Yaga is still living her Hallmark moment outside, when she's done we'll know the details but from what she imparted to me it looks this way. Kitsune can be of different kinds and there are about 13 of them. Each kind is closly affiliated with their own element and draws their powers from it. For example, if your element is water you'll get your strength from it, can do magic with it and will never be harmed by it. The Yaga says if you find your element and manage to use it to ratchet up your powers you'll be able to heal Dyson."

"But how am I supposed to find my element?" Kenzi sounded genuinely confused, "The only nature thing I've felt any special tender feelings to since I turned fae was the tree Dyson banged me against."

"Too much information," the valkyrie waved a protesting hand as if to banish the mental image, "the same Russian beauty contest winner of 1914 says you'll have to pass a trial or two … or all the 13 until we get down to the element that won't harm you."

"No," a voice interrupted the girls' exchange from behind the fox's back. Absorbed in the newly surfaced facts Kenzi and Tamsin failed to notice the wolf shift and Dyson's human form, resolute and angry, take his place. "No trials for Kenzi, enough of that," he gritted out, too agitated to think about covering his now fur-less body, "I'd rather be crippled than have you risk your life for me."

"I will risk my life if that's what it takes to get you well again. The same as I risked it when I got your love back, D-man, if you care to remember," the girl said turning to face her strung-up lover. "At that time I did it for all of us, we needed you whole for Bo to win, for us to survive the Garuda. This time around I am being selfish for a change, I am doing it for myself, this time _I_ need you whole." Dyson was just about to voice more protests but Kenzi hurried to shut him up both with her hand to his mouth and her words. "And stop arguing or I'll use my current physical advantage to handcuff you to the fridge and not a single of the ladies present will bother to intervene. They like me much better than a grumbling unshaven shaggy wolf anyway."

"True enough, sorry, partner," Tamsin spoke up gruffly from her spot, "I'll even provide my best pair of handcuffs though I've been saving them for a special occasion of a different nature. And if you take a moment to apply your pretty head to something else beside carrying your beard around you might stumble upon the idea that the hormonal fox here can well need the stabilizing effect of finding her element and delving deeper into her powers not to go from charmingly unhinged to full-out batshit crazy."

For a short while Dyson stilled under two pairs of intense light eyes, a small resigned sigh escaped his obstructed lips and he covered Kenzi's tiny hand with his big one and pressed a kiss into her palm. The dark-haired girl rightfully interpreted it as an olive-branch gesture and flung herself onto his chest. "I'll be so happy not to shackle you, I much prefer you with your hands allowed some freedom," she whispered while the valkyrie let a small smile play on her contented face. "And I'd ask you to cover your wolfy parts," the blonde tacked on, "I'm getting easily embarrassable in my old age."

Trick suddenly looked burdened under his grand-daughter's smoldering gaze. "Power is not something to be shouldered for the sake of saving your friends, Bo," he stated matter-of-factly, "Power is actually something that will very soon render you friendless anyway. Look at me, I lost pretty much everyone I loved."

"And saved so many more lives," the succubus reminded gently, "And you've never been friendless. Dyson, for instance, has been by your side for centuries and you've never been just a king to him."

Trick shook his head stubbornly, "But I can't stop thinking what our lives might have been if I had taken my wife and daughter away from the wars and fate-writing."

"Most probably, I wouldn't be standing here right now, Trick, I wouldn't be at all," Bo gave a sad little laugh at the idea which somehow didn't seem that devastating to her at that moment. "I realize the risks," she went on shedding the sentimentality and switching to a firmer tone, "But if that's a price to pay to keep everyone I love safe from the persecutions of a mad ruler and a malicious ruler, I am game. Besides, what's the sense of being the most powerful succubus of royal blood ever born if all I put myself to is bedroom workout and eyeliner experimenting."

Her last words failed totally as a joke they were intended to be and the brunette leaned to hug her miserable grand-father tightly. "I've never been a political animal, Gramps, I could use some pointers here," she begged more for his acceptance rather than for help. "What should I do apart from being charming and getting more crotch-revealing opponent-distracting skirts in my wardrobe?"

Trick's sigh could have blown out a full candle-stick of burning wicks. "We'll start with the easiest – a petition for Hale's dethroning to be put before the High council. I am sure the Morrigan will gladly add her weight to it."

"And for such a skinny bitch she has a surprising lot of that," Bo remarked briskly.

"What she lacks in muscle mass she makes up for in her scheming abilities," the Blood King reminded the woman, "Something that has never been your strength."

"Let's just say I am better motivated, if I don't come through, Lauren might be forever a slave and Kenzi will be a fugitive from the fae law until caught and charged," the succubus lost her facetiousness. "And believe me, Trick, I am a very fast motivated leaner."

"We'll start with the most accessible element – the earth," the Yaga pontificated, rapt at the attention the younger fae accorded her. "There's plenty of it around and the worst you risk suffering from it is indigestion."

"Yuck," Kenzi face scrunched into a grossed-out grimace, "You don't mean I have to eat it, do you?"

"That's the simplest way of getting your system to interact with it," Tamsin, the slightly tipsy voice of reason, butted in.

"Well, I could poke a finger in a pool of mud and see if it drops off without a smudge," the kitsune grumbled without much conviction while the Yaga handed her a big wooden spoon.

"Another of your Russian heirloom pieces?" Kenzi inquired squatting down and scooped a spoonful off the cleanest-looking patch of soil.

Tamsin backed off a little and came to the porch stairs where Dyson had insisted on dragging his limping self to to watch the proceedings. "Unclench, wolf," she whispered in what she hoped passed for a comforting tone, "It's just a lump of earth, won't kill her even if it's not her element."

In sync with her words Kenzi went on to stick the spoon into her mouth and swallowed laboriously. A gob of mud slithered its way down her throat and to her stomach and for a second the girl stilled unsure of the sensation. The next moment she doubled over and was violently sick right onto the Yaga's shoes.

"No, definitely not my element," the youngest fae wheezed as soon as the heaving stopped and she got back to breathing.

"Let's take something more taxing next then – fire for instance," the Yaga croaked vindictively being clearly put in a less than charitable frame of mind by the sight of her ruined footwear, "Go get the brazier from the backyard, blonde Northerner, and set up a fire. Your alcohol breath should be of much help."

"Too much free hooch lying around," Tamsin jerked up a shoulder and trudged reluctantly to get the required implement. As soon as she got the flames dancing the Yaga, mindful of the outsome of the first trial, moved to a more remote position on the porch. "Touch the flames and if it's your element, it won't hurt you," she instructed the fox enthusiastically from there.

"I'm more apprehensive about the not-my-element-again option," Kenzi snapped, her nerves visibly fraying at the sight of the open fire in front of her.

"If she gets seriously injured, you'll touch the flames with your head, old hag," Dyson hissed across the expanse of the stairs, "Even if I have to crawl over to you." The wolf's words carried so much persuasive power that they obviously made the Yaga's keen curiosity take a nose-dive and brought about a change towards an almost motherly concern in her. "Poor girl, I'll go get a healing salve just in case," she murmured and hurried inside the cabin.

Kenzi, in the meantime, took a deep breath and with a quick mantra of "I've-seen-them-scarier" she stuck her left hand into the flickering flames. For a split second, as she was about to announce a lack of sensation in her fire-licked fingers, a triumphant smile curled her lips but then it was wiped clean off her face when agonizing pain registered belatedly and the girl jerked her hand back with a yelp. Luckily, the promised salve was quick in coming and turned out to be the real deal. The Yaga slathered the burnt area with the plantain-smelling substance and declared the fox out of the wood and herself off to prepare for the next trial.

Kenzi flopped down next to Dyson on the wooden stairs cradling her hand to her chest.

"Two off the list, about eleven more to go," the shifter said dejectedly, "Are you sure you need to go through with it, Kenzi?"

"Let's hope we'll strike gold with the next one or the one after that," the kitsune replied with a forced cheerfulness, "Though if the Sod's law holds, it might well turn out the last one."

"Call it off, babe, we might find another way. I just can't watch you suffer," Dyson sounded near-desperate, his face contorted with another pain on top of the one caused by his broken back.

"You can barely stand a minute of my suffering, try imagining how I feel to see you constantly in agony," the girl put her good hand on his shoulder and caught his eye. There was no frenzy, no turmoil in her own clear grey eyes and Dyson suddenly realized that, despite the trying circumstances or, conversely, due to them, his little fox might well be nearing the stabilizing stage of her kitsune-hood.

"Trust me, Dy, that may not be the only way but it's the best one for both of us," she said soothingly, "You told me I have to embrace the animal in me, trust her. And now she is telling me we need it for more reasons than one."

"Just so that you know, I am already mastering my crutches," the wolf managed a crooked smile.

"You'll remind me of that if I fail. Or if the Yaga tells me to eat slugs next and I decide to call it a day," Kenzi picked up on his tone.

"Slugs? What are we, French?" the harsh voice croaked from the threshold, "Wigged powdered bastards had it coming when they thought they could take Moscow. No slugs, thunder. I've already got the spell ready."

"That is after you take a bath, thunder is better faced de-skunked," Tamsin cut in appearing on the porch with a towel slung over her shoulder. "The bathroom is gender-assigned, so take a long breather, wolf," she ordered sensing suspicion in Dyson's look and quickly dragged Kenzi inside the cabin.


	18. Chapter 18

Chapter 18

"Really? Am I that stinky?" Kenzi inquired incredulously glaring at the ancient-looking bathtub filled to the brims. "I've just recently had a water teleport treatment."

"Exactly, seeing as you are so water-friendly, it might be worth a try," Tamsin nodded towards the glimmering surface.

"Oh, you mean water can be my element, clever Tammy?" the penny finally dropped and the fox seemed much more enthusiastic about the forthcoming ablution, "And how do you plan to put it to the test? A bath never hurt me even in my human days."

"Well, that's the part you might not quite like," the valkyrie sighed and made the most of her element of surprise grabbing Kenzi by the hair and sticking her head into the water. It took a considerable amount of effort to hold the instinctively struggling kitsune down but the ancient warrior gave it her best and in a short while the kicking and thrashing motions grew fainter whether from exhaustion on the slowly drowning girl's part or from her willing acceptance of the rigours of the test. In a final jerk Kenzi opened her mouth and let a few bubbles of air out and a few gulps of water in, seconds later the tiny body of the ex-human was hanging all limp over the bathtub lip. The blonde released her pressure on Kenzi's neck and gave a tentative shove, then another. The kitsune didn't respond with as much as a reflexive shudder. That was when Tamsin started to get a bad feeling about it and pulled the girl out.

With a wet sound Kenzi flopped down on the floor and the valkyrie was at her side lightning-fast checking for the heartbeat and for breath. "The wolf's gonna skin me," she muttered gritting her teeth at finding none of the above. "Come on, Kenz, you are no fish, I got it!" Tamsin inhaled deeply and set about mouth-to-mouth resuscitation her wigged-out mind came up with.

"You, well-intentioned bitch!" Kenzi spat out the remnants of water together with the heart-felt characteristic and leant against the side of the bathtub.

"Nothing personal, Kenz, I was just trying to help you along in your suicide mission," Tamsin viewed the gasping girl cautiously.

"Too much zeal, blondie," the fox mumbled reproachfully, "Next time make sure to let me know you are going to try and kill me."

"That would ruin the effect," the valkyrie gave a half-smile, "And if you are not too pissed with me, I'd appreciate your not telling Dyson about our little experiment."

"About your assassination attempt or about your pathetic lip-lock with the Kenz? I'll save that savoury piece of intel for when I want rid of you for good," Kenzi groaned getting up and bracing herself against the wall, "Am I sufficiently wet to pass for clean?"

"Let's make you a bit less wet not to pass for recently drowned," the blonde grabbed the abandoned towel and proceeded to give Kenzi's a vigorous rub.

"And if we get out of this backwater and back home I might even tell Bo you are a half-decent kisser," the fox teased from under the towel and was treated to a rare blush from the snarky Northerner. "Though I may be biased, I was too dying at the moment to fully appreciate."

When the girls re-appeared on the porch, Dyson was still sitting in the same spot propped against the wooden rail, his crutches within easy reach and Vasiliy curled at his side. The shifter was watching through slit eyes the Yaga who was rambling in her unkempt version of the fore-yard with a busy and important look of someone in control of the situation while to the side observers she was the picture of a loopy old lady mumbling something incoherent under her nose. "She is casting the spell, babe, prepare," the wolf gruffed, obviously a far cry from enthusiastic about the proceedings. "It's gonna get chilly, my love," the girl squatted in front of him putting her hands on his shoulders and kissing him lightly on the lips, "You'd better go inside, the cat is already shivering."

"I'd rather freeze than use the freaking sticks," Dyson retorted with a sidelong glance at his props, "I'll be all right here, Kenz. My crime-fighting partner knows where to scare up some hooch, a show is coming on, I am all set."

Not for a second taken in by the lightness of his tone, the fox frowned as she much preferred Dyson in and away from the front row on this particular show but saw no way around it at the moment. "Try to keep a couple of sober brain cells between you two," Kenzi said instead of protests and topped it off with a wink, "and a spare bottle for when I am back." The eloquent look she threw at the valkyrie was, however, significantly heavier with a warning and Tamsin responded with an understanding nod.

The tiny girl made her way down the stairs and along the grown path coming up to the still mumbling old fae. "I am ready, babushka," Kenzi said softly in Russian jerking the old woman out of her magic-casting state. The Yaga scratched her temple with a gnarled finger and shook her head as if snapping out of a dazed trance. "I am sentimental as all immigrants are," she admitted a bit out of place, "your words make me soft, little fox, so much so that I really wish you and your wolf luck."

"That is beside the fact that I'll owe you a favour if we are lucky and I eventually live to pay you back," Kenzi remarked cockily.

"That is beside that fact," the old woman replied seriously and the girl felt a sudden cold shiver run the length of her spine but rallied and shook the momentary chills off.

Under the incredulous gazes of the wolf and the valkyrie, two old fae who had seen hundreds of years' worth of strange and magic imbued events the stick-like stooping figure of an old woman raised her hands to the clear sky and a barely perceptible flicker of power vibrated through the air. The three fae gave an involuntary shudder in perfect, though unpremeditated, sync as the ethereal resonance reached them enveloping them in an odd mixture of elation and awe of the kind evoked by a force of nature. They were seemingly not the only ones affected by the Yaga's spell as Vasiliy raised himself from the porch, licked his sleepy face awake and with a short snort turned and padded his way into the cabin. Lead-cloured clouds suddenly danced across the blue of the sky and collected into an impressive bank with an astonishing speed, a distant sound

wrecked the near-silence. The Yaga beamed, triumphant at the sight of impending weather distress. "I haven't lost the touch, have I?" she stated smugly.

Kenzi, in fact, was not in the mood to dish out praise as she moved tentatively towards the edge of the forest and closer to the epicenter of the nascent storm as if propelled by a deep-seated attraction impulse. She took another step and halted in her tracks as the greyest of the clouds soared right above her head. A fork of lighting ripped through the mixed dark colours of the sky and a peel of thunder followed close second. The kitsune was rooted to the spot, neither afraid nor invigorated by the heaven's electricity as cool drops of rain splashed onto her recently dried hair.

Kenzi wiped the drops away impatiently and turned her back to the forest with an intention to get back to her friends and announce another blank. A second flash of lightning slashed through the air to the accompaniment of a roll of thunder and hit the top of one of the pines lining the border of the forest. With an explosive cracking sound the tree broke in two and one of the halves swished down towards the ground and the tiny girl who happened to find herself in its way.

Above the commotion of the storm Kenzi managed to catch Dyson's despairing scream and looked up. She didn't have time to react, to kick her reflexes sufficiently into gear to get her out of the hitting range of the tree. The split second before impact was only long enough to let a frenzied thought cross her mind, "Don't fall, I can't leave Dyson like that."

And then the little fox froze, shocked not by the crashing weight and pain but by the most amazing sight she had ever landed her eyes on – the giant splinter of the pine tree stopped its deathly ascension and halted literally in mid-air with its needles quivering in the suddenly gathered wind, the only force that was there to hold the falling wooden bulk.

Slowly the girl started to back away from the scene without breaking her internal unaddressed mantra of "don't-let-it-fall". A dozen blind steps later she bumped into someone whose strong hands squeezed her shoulders. "What the hell is that?" a very freaked-out valkyrie hissed into her ear.

"It's my element, Tammy," the petite brunette whispered back and raised an unconfident arm towards the still hovering tree. "Let it down," she said softly and suited a downward gliding gesture to her words. After a moment's hesitation the fractured trunk plopped down and Kenzi shuddered at the thought of who might have been crushed under it.

"Thunder? Lighting?" the blonde was still breathing heavily, her hot exhale tickling the kitsune's wet hair.

"No, silly," Kenzi replied with a newly restored nonchalance. "Those two have just about killed me. Wind. Wind is my element."

With a mischievous glimmer in her silver eyes the girl twirled the wet locks between her fingers and a light breezed fanned her hair out as if on an unvocalized order. "You see, I don't need a hair-drier any longer," she chortled but immediately reined her mirth in and whirling around jogged back to the cabin to pick up her wolf from his half-crouch on the ground a couple of feet away from the porch that he had managed to cover before the sudden natural ally chose to step in on the fox's side.

That same evening, huddled together in front of the open fire in the inexplicably spacious living room of the Baba Yaga's room, the four fae and the cat were wrapping their collectively head around what they had seen.

"I wished you knew how to stop a natural calamity after setting it off," Tamsin groused throwing another log onto the fire and shivering her way deeper into the blanket.

"Yes, that's a mighty one," the Yaga cast a proud look at the window that framed a piece of the thunderstorm running wild outside.

Kenzi was deaf to their half-hearted bickering, her left arm wrapped tightly around the wolf while her right one was drawing slow careful circles in the air.

"Are you sure you've found it?" Dyson asked gently and the girl's face, scrunched in concentration, relaxed as she twirled a finger and suddenly one of the herb twigs on the window sill shivered, raised unsteadily into the air and made its clumsy way across the room towards them. The kitsune grabbed the sailing herb and sniffed it. "Catmint! You've lucked out, Vasya," she declared and threw the stem towards the flash-quick awake cat. "I have to learn to command enough wind up to transport something heavier, like a nice bottle of liquor," she added with a coveting look towards a row of the Yaga's homebrew lining a shelf in the further recesses of the room.

"You'd better learn to recharge your batteries from your element," the hostess's crisp voice cut in, "Because this is what you need to summon up enough power to cure your wolf. And also because you're spoiling my cat and depleting my alcohol stocks at an alarming rate."

"How do I do it, oh master Yoda?" Kenzi pleaded with a hint of seriousness but the Yaga was not moved by the Star War reference either not recognizing it or else not flattered by being compared to a bald green undersized creature.

"This is your answer to find," she mumbled uncertainly, "I've done my part. And you still owe me a favour, girl."

"What do you want from Kenzi?" Dyson butted in and his eyes were distinctly more yellow than they were blue.

"Simmer down, wolf," the Yaga answered soothingly, not the one to underestimate a dangerous man even when he's on crutches, "I mean no harm to your girl. I'll call my favour in when the time comes, that is when the kitsune has something to offer me. Not now when she's chased, broke and not in full command of her powers."

"You need Trick," Tamsin remarked willing her teeth not to chatter, "And I need Bo. We're done here. I am sure the bar-tender has a nice big mirror we could use to get back."

"Do we have cell reception in this little Russia?" Dyson wondered idly and heard the Yaga give a derisive snort, "Apart from the Internet connection your fox used to get you a portal mirror while you were luxuriating in your hospital bed?"

A light breeze made a round of the room. "We're going home," Kenzi declared.


	19. Chapter 19

Chapter 19

The leave-taking was swift and started out unsentimental when the three fae closed ranks in front of the big mirror that doubled as the Yaga's special delivery service in the corner of the living-room. In a confused awe they were watching the glassy surface that started to ripple and swirl, forced into contortions by the magic. The black cat padded over and rubbed his head against Tamsin's calf in a gesture of unmistakably affectionate good-bye while the Yaga herself surreptitiously dabbed the corners of her old eyes with a sub-clean handkerchief.

"You three are a bit of excess baggage, so huddle closer and hold onto each other," she instructed shakily and added in a more firmly severe tone to cover for her flood of emotion, "And don't forget you owe me one, a very big one, fox. And don't you worry, I'll come to call it in one day. I won't be in a hurry, debts like that only get better with time, like wine."

"Just don't keep it ripening for too long or it might turn sour," Kenzi replied airily in Russian, which brought on another teary attack on the part of the old woman. Catching the signs of traitorous dew the girl then stepped aside from her group to give her compatriot a hearty consolation hug.

"Remember, child, the force of your kitsune and the force of your love can work miracles but it will only last as long as those forces last," the Yaga dropped to a whisper and went on solemnly in answer to Kenzi's perplexed eyebrow-rise. "Your healing, supposing you manage to come through with it in the first place, will stop working on him if you die or if you ever stop loving him."

Kenzi felt as if a sudden cold gust enveloped her whole little body causing it to shudder but Dyson's calm warm voice cut through the chill of premonition, "Save the drama, ladies! If she does either of these two things, I won't care much anyway." The girl's face immediately relaxed out of its frozen tautness and the wolf added half-jokingly, "Come on, fire up your teleport machine, old grumble, some of us are not really comfortable standing up."

'I'll get you lying down first chance I get," Kenzi promised with inflamed zeal and took her place by his side. The mirror turned into a riot of colourful swirls and the Yaga unceremoniously shoved her houseguests forward into its magical depths.

Right at that moment Bo was pacing the length of her bedroom, agitated for once by thoughts far removed from the bed matters and too close to politics for comfort. She was well into her second dozen of laps of the room when she heard a crashing noise coming from downstairs closely followed by a murmur of familiar voices. The succubus hurtled down the stairs and burst into what passed for a living-room in her dilapidated abode to be greeted by the sight of her three rather disheveled and crumpled looking friends sitting on the floor with a uniformly stunned look in front of a broken stand-up mirror.

"Shit, it used to be the only completely functional thing in this place," Bo muttered automatically before the air was squeezed out of her by two thin but surprisingly strong arms and her ear-drums were attacked by a shrill non-verbal expression of delight from her ex-human bestie.

The emergency council of war was held as soon as the shards of glass were swept up, the through-the-looking-glass travelers had a chance to catch their breath and straighten their clothes and Trick and Lauren had time to join them. Narratives were exchanged, emotions given vent to, ideas floated.

Lauren was switching her attention from Bo to Tamsin with a preoccupied look, while the valkyrie maintained a carefully crafted mask of half-interested boredom belied by her glaring green eyes boring into everyone in turn and the succubus herself was clearly less than comfortable at being caught in the cross-fire between the two blondes. Trick, in the meanwhile, was watching Dyson and Kenzi alternatively, obviously relieved at finding the new kitsune much more balanced and reasonable as much as he was devastated by the sight of the crutches at his old friend's side.

"Bo as the new Ash-hole!" Kenzi squealed in open delight, "Isn't she the best hole ever as many of the present company can attest!"

That frivolously gleeful remark got her reproachful looks from the said many of the present company and a reprimand from Trick. "It's no laughing matter, Kenzi," the Blood King shook his graying head, "It will take quite a lot to bring about and none of us is still one-hundred per cent convinced that it's the right course of action".

"Well, I am certain of two things – first, after a self-absorbed bass-voiced show-off, a self-sacrificing Naga and a complete loony jerk the fae deserve a good leader and second, Bo can make a damned good leader," Kenzi announced firmly.

"While we are on the topic," Dyson drawled from his spot on the couch, "Where does our yet-unimpeahced leader happen to be at the moment?"

"Last seen in the enchanted room he used to keep the girls in," Bo giggled with a self-satisfied air, "Though he might have found his way out by now."

"I am working on getting him suspended from the position," Trick explained, "and once the motion comes through, the coast is clear for Bo to put in her claim."

"I think I have in all fairness to warn you all," the shifter spoke up again and there was a low growl deep in his chest to go together with his words, "I'm going after Hale as soon as …, well, as soon as I can go at all." Despite the half-hesitant conditional clause tacked-on, there was no mistaking his meaning but no moralizing objections were immediately raised by those who had suffered from the current Ash's actions or, alternatively, recognized Dyson's right to vengeance.

Tamsin suddenly sprang up to her feet and stretched tiredly, "Right, kiddos, time for me to make tracks. I'll have to check in with the Morrigan sooner than I'd like to see her smug mug. See which way this particular cat is about to jump as regards Bo's promotion."

"Be careful, Tamsin," the succubus frowned feeling strangely deflated by the valkryrie's departing intention, "Not too long ago the slick bitch was not above using you against me in collusion with Hale. There's no telling what plans she might have for you now".

"Well, seems like she believes _me_ to be sufficiently important for you," the blonde replied with a careful emphasis, darting a cheeky look at the only human in the room. "But she might not know how important _you_ are for me," she added with another deliberate stress and strutted out of the room.

Instinctively the succubus half-rose as if to follow her – a motion that made Lauren visibly wince but Bo caught her expression out of the corner of her eye and restrained herself. She came up to her lover instead and looped an arm around her waist. "You are staying with me, right?" she asked almost imploringly. The doctor shook her head though without much conviction. "I'd better be going too, Bo. I have work at the lab I need to attend to."

"Well, your patient is here, as well as your lover," Bo put her succu-charm on low heat, "Besides, it's not safe for you to return to the compound. Who knows what the Ash's next crazy act will be. I don't like the idea of your being territorially in his power."

"Actually," Trick interfered with a delicate cough, "Lauren could keep us posted about developments there, it would be … "

"Absolutely inacceptable to risk her well-being and to make her play spy-games for us," his grand-daughter cut him off resolutely, "Lauren is staying here and not going back until Hale is neutralized. Right now she can make herself useful around here by helping me to rearrange what is known as Kenzi's room into something remotely suitable for temporarily hosting a sick wolf." With that the brunette dragged Lauren out of the room and up the stairs.

"And you can make yourself less of a bore by helping me learn how to harness my newly-found element," Kenzi chipped in, "While I'm trying not to contemplate what these two can do to my free-spirit room."

"Great, a half-baked politician and a souped-up baby kitsune and all on my poor head," Trick grumbled with a roll of his eyes towards the peeling ceiling of the crack shack.

Bo made another ineffectual attempt at collecting the various items of clothing and footwear strewn on the floor into anything approaching a neat pile. Lauren, in the meantime, was making the bed, rearranging the extra pillows they had brought over into a prop for Dyson's back. Suddenly she let go of the last pillow and turned to the brunette sharply. "Why are you doing this, Bo?" the doctor asked, hating the whining note she couldn't wipe out of her voice.

"Cos unless I manage to clear the path, the wolf will definitely trip in this obstacle course of a room," Bo said focused on the crumpled shirts in her arms.

"No, I am talking about becoming the next Ash," the blonde corrected.

"Oh," for a second Bo looked startled, "in a nutshell, I think it's the best way of protecting you and Kenzi from persecution and of making the fae world a bit better."

"Once you're elected, Kenzi can align herself with the Light and you'll find an Ash-way of clearing her of the charges. And me? Are you going to free me from fae-servitude or keep me on as your human pet doctor?"

The succubus was piqued by the unmasked bitterness in the other woman's voice and she bit down an indignant remark. "Of course, I'll free you, Lauren," she replied enunciating each word instead.

"And once I'm free, you'll be ok with me going away from the fae-services to possibly work at another, human, facility?" Lauren persisted.

"Like the one headed by doctor Halt?" Bo didn't manage to keep the retort down and immediately regretted her tone, sensing a deep-running sadness in her lover. "I don't know what happens next, Lauren. I want you to be free, I want you to choose what you want to do. But I am also afraid of you leaving the fae, cos that would drive us apart, cos you know too much about the fae and might be used against us by someone. I don't have answers now, my love, but we'll work them out, I promise."

Lauren lowered herself wearily onto the bed. "I guess I am also afraid of being driven apart, Bo, by my hypothetical freedom as much as by your impending Ash-dom."

"Well, I might not get elected after all, remember, the Stag hunt is a tricky affair," the succubus smiled consolingly.

"One way or another you'll rule," the blonde remarked with resigned conviction, "That's what you were born for."

Trick delved into the leather bag that he had hanging on a massive strap over his shoulder and produced a square tome that looked dusty and old and was adorned with intricate hieroglyphs. "Here," with a crooked grin he pushed the book across the coffee table towards the immediately tensed-up girl, "My usual response to problems that can't be resolved by killing someone."

"A thick book? So like you," Kenzi sighed with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.

"What did you expect me to bring you? A Youtube video course on how to be a real kitsune, preferably no longer than 15 minutes?" the Blood King chuckled, "This is a unique book, a diary of a Japanese kitsune of 17th century who wrote down how she learned to harness her powers and harmonize with her element. She was an orphan who was brought up outside her clan and had to come by everything the hard way – on her own. I thought you might find some pointers there, though she was a water kitsune."

Kenzi fingered the book with a bit more respect and opened it. "And how exactly am I to tap into the ancient wisdom?" she asked staring in a perplexed way at the columns of hieroglyphs running down the page. Another long-suffering sigh later Trick leaned over and passed a hand over the page – like soldiers obeying the orders the unreadable squiggles swiftly rearranged themselves into horizontal lines of English words. "There is a multilingual trans feature installed," the Blood King smiled, "Though you could put your exceptional memory to a good use for once and learn some Japanese."

"Duh!" the girl swept a disdainful hand in the air, "What for? I still prefer books with pictures. Kama Sutra, for instance, comics, fashion glossies."

She flipped over another page and her eyes hit upon what she had just talked about – a skillfully detailed drawing of a man in a samurai outfit. "Ha! So, it's not gonna be that boring after all! Who's that?" she asked curiously peering into the image.

"The man she loved, the man she saved from the bottom of the sea," Trick got up from the couch and stretched a hand for Dyson to shake. "Read the book, Kenzi," he instructed by way of the farewell word and waddled out of the door.

And that was precisely what the young fox got down to once the crack shack inhabitants settled down in their respective bedrooms.

"Will the bedside light bother you, Dy?" she asked fidgeting for a better position against the high pillow with the tome in her hand.

"No more than the sounds coming from Bo's bedroom," the wolf grumbled without malice.

"I can read aloud, that will muffle the naughtiness and you might pin down something I can miss," Kenzi suggested and coughed herself into her best reading voice. She didn't have to exercise it for long, though, as Dyson fell into exhausted slumber somewhere around the bottom of the second page, the combined nose level of the three girls in the house clearly not high enough to prevent him from crashing out. With a peck on his cheek and a tuck-in of his blanket Kenzi bade her silent sweet-dreams to him and returned to her read of the night.

Bo was not disturbed by the rays of the late-morning sun as much as by a strange jarring sound that seemed to be reverberating off the walls. She peeled open her eyes and squinted against the light, her face fanned by a current of cool air. "Lauren," she elbowed the woman lying next to her into an awaken state and raised herself sharply, "Something is happening, something is creaking. And it's ways too windy for the inside of the house. I am pretty sure I closed the window."

"What is it?" the human doctor was even slower to get her bearings, stretching her sleep-laden limbs.

"I have not the vaguest but we'd better get out and find our four-legged friends," the succubus ordered briskly and pulled her lover from under the covers.

"Out! All out!" they heard a top-of-the-lungs shriek from somewhere inside the house and put on a burst of speed, for once obeying the shouted instruction without hesitation.

They had barely made it out of the shack after a quick detour to Kenzi's room, that they found empty, when the whole unsound structure gave another horrendous creak and started shaking violently. Pieces of drywall and wood came flying around and the two women cowered to the ground in an attempt to escape unwelcome collisions. A few more tremors and ear-slitting moans of tired wood and the house tumbled down like a house of cards blown over by a destructive child. In a cold-sweat stupefaction Bo was looking at the disorderly heap that used to give her shelter and felt her heart constrict as another thought flashed in her mind. "They weren't anywhere in the house, right, Lo?" she vocalized her concern and the blonde shook her head reassuringly.

"Nope, we've been out," came another reassurance and Bo whirled round to face her abashed bestie, "I am so sorry, Bobo, I was reading all night and the book is really a page-turner and I thought I might try something I read about and …" here Kenzi swept a hand across the background of the debris, "I think I still have to learn to calibrate the gale force."

"Well, I guess we'll have to find a more politically-friendly image-consolidating dwelling for an Ash-wanna-be," Dyson's deep voice cut in as he approached the girls in an unsteady crutch-aided limp.

"Just as well," came another sneering remark and the tall blonde appeared on the scene and strode over to give her ex-partner a shoulder to lean on. "I'm actually here to bring you, kids, some news from the big land as the authorized representative of the dark attached to supervise the electoral campaign of our novice candidate. As the Morrigan said when she hit on this kind of use for my services, we'll break the mold with this," Tamsin went on unperturbed by the sight of the destruction, "First, the good news for you – the Elders threw Hale out on his ear for abuse of power and suspected crimes against the fae. Second, the good news for Hale –he's managed to escape and his current location is yet undiscovered."


End file.
